


Components

by Braincoins



Series: Connection-verse [6]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Amputation, Blood, F/M, Ghost weasels, M/M, Magic, Season 2 AU, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-20
Updated: 2016-12-20
Packaged: 2018-09-10 18:08:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 39,476
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8926975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Braincoins/pseuds/Braincoins
Summary: Shiro's not quite himself anymore. It's up to the paladins and Allura to set things right, even if that means making difficult choices, facing fears, and forging new bonds.





	

**Author's Note:**

> \- As usual, muchas gracias to the ever-clever Knightwraith for idea help, and to him, [Tybunny](http://tybunnehthehellmoose.tumblr.com), and Miss L for their always spot-on beta-reading. Also, big thanks out to my editor, Echo Menhir - [explodingcrenelation](http://explodingcrenelation.tumblr.com/) \- for the editing and advice. <3
> 
> \- GAC: Galra Authorized Currency. See the VLD comics, issue #1
> 
> \- I need to stop borrowing from Event Horizon for these fics. This is supposed to a kids' show, dammit!
> 
> \- Since Coran's explanation gets cut off, his 'old saying' is meant to be similar to something like "Half a loaf is better than no bread." In this case though, a wytael is a vicious predator that is so hard to kill that even cutting it in half only reduces the threat rather than eliminating it. Still, better to face an already cut-in-half wytael than a full one. It still carries the same meaning of making do with what you can get/appreciating what you have.
> 
> \- [Walter Hermann Schottky](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_H._Schottky) (23 July 1886 – 4 March 1976) was a German physicist who played a major early role in developing the theory of electron and ion emission phenomena, invented the screen-grid vacuum tube in 1915 and the pentode in 1919 while working at Siemens, co-invented the ribbon microphone and ribbon loudspeaker along with Dr. Erwin Gerlach in 1924 and later made many significant contributions in the areas of semiconductor devices, technical physics and technology.
> 
> \- The [Goddess of the Universe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beast_King_GoLion#Other_allies%0A) concept originated in Beast King GoLion: "She is one that split the GoLion into five robotic lions to teach the GoLion humility. So many years later, after GoLion proven his worth and learning humility [sic], the Goddess of the Universe restores the GoLion's lost power and made it stronger than ever." 
> 
> \- Yes, they go back and get their helmets. Yeesh.
> 
> \- "Still keeping this the same rating as the show!" she told herself as she has Keith constantly use H-E-Double-Hockey-Sticks and Allura make an inappropriate innuendo about Shiro. "Yup! Nothing objectionable here!" :D
> 
> \- I was first introduced to the concept of "Give Shiro a New Kickass Arm" by [This Amazing Artwork](http://zillabean.tumblr.com/post/150880908932/so-ive-had-this-silly-headcanon-rolling-around-in) by the equally amazing [Zillabean](http://zillabean.tumblr.com/). At first I was just like "Oh, that'd be nifty," but pretty much as soon as I started writing this fic, it came back to me and I was like, "IT MUST BE SO." :3  
> =============================================

            Shiro stumbled forward. “What happened?” he asked, blinking against the light. It was so _bright_. He was in the infirmary, and everyone was here, and they were… they were watching him like they weren’t quite sure of who he was. Face after face – even _Keith_ was studying him carefully, and Shiro started to worry.

            Allura was the first one to step forward. “How do you feel, Shiro?” It didn’t escape his notice that Keith twitched towards her, like… like maybe he wanted to hold her back?

            He frowned. “Confused.” He tried to focus, tried to remember, but, as usual, it was bits and pieces. _I remember… anger. Pain. Hatred. Why?_ “I’m getting real sick of not being able to remember things.”

            “You don’t remember?” Keith asked, but Allura just shushed him.

            Shiro shook his head. “It’s… there’s nothing.” He looked behind him as the cryo-pod’s shield reset itself and it descended. He turned back to his friends. “I can’t…” But he could do mental math well enough. “Did I… hurt someone?” _Was it Allura? Was it Keith? Pidge? WHO? How? Why would I ever…?_ But nothing else explained Keith’s reactions. “If I did, I… I’m sorry. I would never…”

            And then Allura was hugging him, almost too tightly, and he hugged her back, because what else could he do? He was worried about what he might’ve done, but it was good to hold her. He looked over her shoulder at the guys, wanting one of them to explain. He saw them ease down a little. Pidge smiled faintly and Hunk smiled widely. Lance put a hand on Keith’s shoulder, and Coran heaved a sigh of relief.

            As he woke up more, his senses sharpened. Shiro started to feel a little… off. Something was different about him. He felt lighter on one side, somehow. His right side. He tensed a little and tried to move the fingers on his right hand. They drummed lightly against Allura’s back in response. He wanted to rub her back with his right hand and it responded. Everything responded fine, it just felt…

            _Better_. Everything felt better. There was no sick feeling of heaviness, of evil. It was like the feeling when Allura would feed energy into his arm directly, except he could move the arm rather than its being frozen in place and… and the feeling wasn’t going away. It was always short-lived, but while she was doing it, his arm would feel closer to normal. It never felt entirely natural – it was still a chunk of metal where skin and bone had been once – but she had made it feel… acceptable, somehow? Like she took the darkness out of it. It wasn’t something he was good at explaining.

            His arm felt like that now. He could move it, and it was good. It was _good_. He pulled his arm away from her, stepped back from her a bit so he could look at it… and he froze. He stared at it. _This isn’t…_

            And then Allura kissed him, just once, quickly. It redirected his attention briefly, and she took hold of his right hand in both of hers as she smiled reassuringly. “I know. It must feel… different. We can explain while you eat.”

            He wanted to demand an explanation now, right now, but his stomach grumbled. “Yeah, maybe that’s… maybe that’s for the best.” Coran was the first to head to the door and they all let Allura tug him towards the hallway. Smiles from his team were getting easier to come by. “How long was I in there this time?”

            She cleared her throat as the paladins followed them out. “Well, it all started – ”

 

**30 Sleep Cycles Ago**

 

            It was supposed to be a team-spar. Paladins vs. Training Drones. It was supposed to build their teamwork as well as highlight individual strengths and weaknesses. It was supposed to be helpful for all of them, but especially for Shiro.

            In the month since the oozebeast and the reconnection with their Lions, they’d been doing a lot of team-building exercises. In that month, Keith and Lance had been spending a lot of their free time together. So had Shiro and Allura. And those standing on the outside of these relationships – namely Coran, Pidge, and Hunk – had noticed something peculiar.

            Keith had gotten more laidback. Lance was less annoying. Allura was calmer. But the leader of the paladins was increasingly more on edge. He was snappish and irritable at odd times. First thing in the morning would’ve been understandable, though still odd for Shiro; as it was, any time of day or night he was practically snapping verbal whips at the paladins, and was hardly much better with the Alteans. Allura got less of it than others, and she was also the only one who could snap him out of it. Increasingly, she had to use her energy to calm him down, sometimes sending the energy directly into his arm. Pidge had noticed that doing so made the arm lock up, but it also made Shiro ease down afterwards. It was almost like the princess had given him some sort of sedative shot, and he’d be more or less back to normal instead of aggressive and snarly.

            Coran had suggested a team-spar to help them all further connect and to give Shiro a way to burn off some of that aggression. It’d been kind of a spontaneous idea, but they’d all jumped for it; Lance and Keith had raced each other down to the training deck. It had sounded like a good plan, like fun, and Pidge had been looking forward to it. Maybe she’d learn some new close combat moves from Keith and Shiro and get some practice in dealing with longer-range foes, which she was still shakier on. It was good to have Lance and Hunk at her back but she didn’t want to have to depend on them to cover her own butt. She’d gotten better with using the grapple line in combat, but she still saw room for improvement.

            And things had started out good. They protected each other well, the fight was flowing smoothly, and Allura and Coran, who were up in the viewing booth, were cheering them on. And, of course, Keith and Lance started up one of their usual competitions; dating each other didn’t dilute their need to beat the snot out of one another in any and every way possible. (The fact that they _were_ dating just made their rivalry tolerable and actually amusing, at least to Pidge.)

            “Ha! That’s ten!”

            “Twelve for me.”

            “Liar!”

            “Not my fault you’re slow.”

            “You probably can’t even count right.” Rifle blast. “Also, eleven now.”

            “Thanks, Lance!” Hunk put in.

            “No problemo, buddy!”

            Keith calmly reported, “Fourteen.”

            “What?! How?!”

            “Shut up and FIGHT, you two,” Shiro snapped. “You can flirt later. This is a battle.”

            “It’s just sparring, Shiro,” Hunk reminded him, but Pidge saw Allura already leaving the overhead booth. _Good. I get the feeling we’re gonna need her down here._

            “If you’re not going to take it seriously, Hunk, then just leave,” Shiro shot back as he practically eviscerated a training drone.

            “Hey!”

            “Shiro,” Pidge ducked and tased a drone, “go easy on them.”

            “GO EASY?” he yelled. “Pause training sequence!” The drones all stopped; those with melee weapons were frozen in mid-swing in some cases. “GO EASY? Do you think the Galra are going to go easy on us? Do you think saving the universe is going to be some sort of cakewalk? We have to be able to go the distance and do whatever is necessary to take out our enemies.”

            Hunk frowned and took a step back. “Whoa, whoa, Shiro. We know that, but this is training.”

            “You need to train hard so you can fight hard,” Shiro insisted. “There’s no other way to win. And in this fight, there are only two options: victory or death.”

            “You sound like a Galra,” Keith told him.

            And then Shiro snapped. He _lunged_ at Keith, hand glowing. Pidge wasn’t the only one yelling his name to stop, and Lance pulled Keith out of Shiro’s path because, of course, Keith was going to stand his ground. “What are you doing?”

            “Saving your a- !” Lance began, but he was cut off by Allura running into the room.

            “Shiro!” she barked, and he whirled to glare at her. “Stop this!”

            “Stop what? Going easy on them?! If I keep soft-pedaling it, we’ll never win!”

            “That’s an _order_ ,” she told him, but he snarled.

            Pidge could see it in the set of Shiro’s jaw, in the tension in his muscles: after so much time training and sparring, she knew when an attack was imminent. She’d also learned to lead her targets.

            So when Shiro started towards Allura, Pidge shot out her grapple line. It wrapped around him, bringing him to the ground. She tased him until he passed out. She heard shocked exclamations of her name (well, her nickname), but she stood over him, frowning. “I didn’t want to, but…” She shrugged. “I’m not in uniform; I don’t have a quick way to hack into his hand.” She worked on unwrapping the line.

            “I can’t believe he was going to attack you!” Lance said to Keith, now that the immediate danger was past.

            “I can’t believe he was going to attack _Allura_ ,” Keith replied.

            Allura joined Pidge in getting Shiro free from the grapple line, then bent and picked up the unconscious Shiro. It was still a little disorienting to see her casually manage to lift so much weight. “Let’s get him to the infirmary; we’ll talk about this later.”

            “I’ll meet you there,” Coran said over the mic.

 

            Lance was radiating concern next to him, but Keith couldn’t get the image of Shiro attacking him out of his head. The _rage_ in his eyes, the hatred… he’d never seen Shiro look like that, and he’d seen Shiro pretty ticked off before. Shiro had hated him in that moment, and Keith was sure of that.

            _That’s not Shiro. Not really. Something’s gone wrong._

            The only obvious change was the relationship with Allura, but that couldn’t be the cause. Keith had caught them a time or two, and when Shiro was with her, he was calm, he was himself. Heck, he was happier than Keith had ever seen him, and all Allura had to do was smile at him or kiss his cheek.

            So it couldn’t be that. But what was it then? They were all more in sync with their Lions than ever before. They were working better as a team, the disaster of this spar aside. What was it?

            “Keith, you okay?”

            “I’m fine, Lance; just… thinking.” They were following the princess and their unconscious leader into the infirmary. Coran had, in fact, beaten them there, and he had a cryo-pod up and ready.

            “Don’t burn anything out up there,” Lance teased lightly with a couple quick taps on Keith’s temple, but his concern was still obvious in his eyes. Keith patted his shoulder. _He’s going to want to talk about this later._ He wasn’t sure yet if he wanted to talk about it or not. He had to admit, talking things through with Lance helped sometimes, but it still wasn’t something he was used to doing. Shiro was like a brother to him; this hit home _hard_. And he was too used to licking his wounds in private. _We’ll see_.

            Allura set Shiro down gingerly in one of the pods. “Does he really need that?” Hunk asked.

            “I did tase him pretty good,” Pidge admitted sheepishly.

            “It’s just a precaution,” Allura told them all. “We’ll be right here when he awakens.” The ‘glass’ shimmered down over the pod, and Allura punched in some commands. “I’ll set it to auto-heal, just in case.”

            “There _is_ something wrong with him,” Keith asserted. “He’s not acting like himself.”

            “That’s an understatement,” Hunk replied. He gestured to the cryo-pod. “What even was that back there? Attacking Keith? Attacking _Allura_?! I was waiting for his head to spin around and him to start spewing or something!”

            “He’s not _you_ ,” Lance commented.

            “Hey, my head does not spin around!”

            Pidge, who’d been quiet for most of the trip over, piped up with, “What was it you said, Lance? Back in the hangar that time?”

            “What time?” he asked.

            “When we were waiting on Shiro to come out of his Lion? Remember, we had trouble forming Voltron and he was in there for almost an hour and a half?” Pidge glanced over at Shiro in the pod. “You asked if he was turning into a Galra.”

            They all paled. “Okay, but I was way off base on that, I admit,” Lance said hastily. “I mean, that is possibly the one time in my life when I was completely wrong.”

            “Shiro is _not_ turning into a Galra,” Keith told her – hell, told them _all_. “That is not something that can happen.”

            “I sure hope not,” Hunk said, “’cause he was kinda…”

            And then there was a THUD! from inside the pod. Shiro was awake again and he didn’t look happy. Coran actually pulled Allura away from the cryo-pod as Shiro beat on the inside of it. Warning beeps started as his hand lit up. His fingers went flat and he shoved his hand through the blue shield like a blade, cutting his way out. The blue shimmered away but he cut through the pod’s sides as it powered down, the beeps and shrill warning tones dying off. And then Shiro was loose.

            Keith’s bayard was in his hand again with hardly a conscious thought. “Lance, Hunk, don’t you dare!” Allura warned them.

            Shiro was screaming in anger as he charged at Pidge. She had her own bayard in her hands, but Keith ran to help her anyway. He knew she could fight well – they’d all seen it – but that didn’t mean she had to fight alone.

            And then Shiro froze. Allura had swooped around behind him and gotten hold of his right arm. And it was locked up as her hands glowed blue and Pidge saw her chance and tased him on his left side again. There was gonna be a scar there when he finally came to, most likely.

            “Keith!” Allura called. “You have to take his arm off!”

            “WHAT?!” he shrieked.

            “Oh, cripes,” Hunk whispered.

            “Are you serious?!” Lance asked.

            “VERY,” she said. She looked to Keith. “It’s the only thing I can think of that might be causing this.”

            And, what the hell, she might be right: Galra arm pulsing with Galra energy? Keith adjusted his grip on his bayard as he backed up a little. “Alright then. Get out of the way.”

            Lance was still aghast. “For real?!”

            “YES.” _I’m not going to like it, but…_ And he charged. Allura shifted away from Shiro’s shoulder, holding his arm by the wrist, both hands still glowing. Pidge and Coran were holding him up on his left side because the long tase had knocked him unconscious again.

            But just as Keith brought his sword down, Shiro woke up.

            The scream was deafening, but short-lived; when Keith brought his sword around between himself and his mentor, Allura was at his side and he was already passed out again. “What…?”

            “I… don’t know how I…” she was saying. She was looking at her fingers in confusion.

            “Finally figured out how your father put you to sleep, did you?” Coran asked sadly.

            “Let’s get him back into a pod,” she said instead. “Quickly.”

            Shiro’s arm – or, rather, where it had been – was bleeding profusely, and Keith swallowed hard. The scream was still echoing in his ears and he backed up to almost fall into a seat on the steps. Lance appeared next to him, but he didn’t really hear or see what he was doing because he was looking at the Galra arm laying on the floor of the infirmary where Allura must’ve dropped it when she went to knock Shiro out. Shiro’s arm, and his blood.

            “KEITH.” Lance’s voice finally got through to him. He turned to look at him.

            Lance took hold of his head in both hands then pressed his forehead against Keith’s and started whispering to him in Spanish. He didn’t know much of the language, but that was why it worked so well to calm him down: he didn’t have to think about what was being said. He could just listen to the soothing tone of Lance’s babbling. He closed his eyes and tried to keep it together, and listened to his boyfriend’s voice. It sounded different in Spanish, to him, anyway. But it was nice.

            When Lance finally released him, Allura had safely stowed Shiro in another cryo-pod. His wound had stopped bleeding thanks to the pod’s healing, and he looked like he wasn’t about to wake up and attack again any time soon. “Stasis as well as healing,” she was saying, in answer to …someone’s question; he hadn’t been paying attention. “Until we can figure this out.”

            Everyone’s eyes fell to the arm again. And the blood. Pidge murmured something about “analysis” and left. Hunk went with her. Coran tried to get the princess to leave, but she pulled her arm away from him, and he gave up and left, too.

Keith took a single step towards the arm and Allura and then Lance was hauling him off with a wiry strength he often forgot his boyfriend had. He wanted to stay, to… do something, but there wasn’t really anything to do, so he let Lance drag him away.

            He watched Allura watching Shiro until the infirmary doors closed.

 

            Lance pulled Keith toward the showers. “C’mon, you need to clean up. I’m going to run your clothes through a cycle, too.”

            Keith was still eerily quiet. Not his _normal_ quiet, which was really just “quieter than Lance was used to”. This was less “quietly observe and speak up when I have something to say” (normal Keith) and more “robot on mental blue screen.” The silence didn’t break until they walked into the bathroom. “Wait, why are we here?”

            Lance sighed. _He wasn’t even listening to me._ “You: shower. Clothes: laundry.”

            “What? Why?”

            Lance really, really didn’t want to have to tell him this. He swallowed a bit and then steered Keith in front of one of the full-length mirrors. He saw his eyes widen as he took in the blood splatter on his face, neck, and shirt. Lance wasn’t sure if it was better that they’d been sparring in their civvies or not: on the one hand, these were Keith’s “Earth” clothes that had Shiro’s blood on them now, but on the other, the blood against the white of the paladin uniform would’ve been…

            “Oh,” Keith practically whispered. It seemed all he could manage.

            “Get in the shower,” Lance urged. “I’ll drop your clothes into the laundry. They’ll be done in no time.” It should’ve been unnecessary to say – Altean cleaning technology seemed to be some of the best in the universe (which made it even more maddening that those cryo-pods didn’t clean themselves) – but he clearly needed to spell things out for Keith right now.

            Keith nodded, turning away from the mirror and peeling off his shirt. He moved robotically, and Lance’s brow furrowed as he trailed after him, picking up discarded clothing while trying not to touch the bloodied bits. Normally, Lance might’ve been appreciating the increasingly-nice view, but he was too worried about his boyfriend ( _it’s still nice to call him that_ ) to ogle. Keith walked into a shower stall and let the door close behind him. Thank goodness the stalls activated automatically, or Lance was worried he’d have to do that for him, too.

            He took the clothes to the laundry, er…hole, as he typically thought of it, and nudged the button with an elbow so the door would open. He dropped Keith’s clothes straight down into it and barely remembered to retrieve the bayard and the knife before they got laundered, too. Probably they’d be okay, but he didn’t want to take the chance. The door closed and the cycle started. It wouldn’t take much longer than Keith’s shower, and probably used similar “sonic” cleansing; Lance wasn’t really interested in the hows and whys of it all. It didn’t have the “fresh scent” he associated with clean laundry from back home, but it did keep them all from stinking, which was the important part. And hey, no fading!

            He sat on the bench, laying the weapons next to him, and tried not to think about what had just happened. _I need to focus up, for Keith’s sake._ He glanced over at the shower stall. The doors were opaque, so he couldn’t see Keith clearly, but he could see the fuzzy human-shape standing still. “We’ll go back to my room when this is done,” he called over. “And talk.”

            “I don’t want to talk.”

            _Well, at least you’re talking **now**._ “I know you don’t, but I think you need to.” Keith didn’t respond to that, and Lance rolled his eyes. _So much for that_. He stood and walked over to lean back against the shower door. “I’d like to talk about it. I mean, just… just for myself. I’ve never seen Shiro act like that before, and…” He stood up a little straighter as he remembered. “And you were just going to stand there and _let him_ attack you?!”

            “I could’ve defended myself.”

            “Not when he’s actually doing the whole glowy hand thing!” Lance insisted. “He’d’ve cut right through your sword, you dumb mullet! He could’ve melted your face off! LITERALLY!”

            “I said I could’ve handled it.”

            “You were gonna get yourself killed, and then what would we do?” He frowned and looked towards the laundry hole. _What would **I** do? I was just getting used to this. You can’t just go and die on me. And I don’t want to see you in one of those pods, all frozen like that._

            “I can take care of myself.”

            “But you don’t have to. That’s the _point_ , Keith. We’re a team! I mean all of us, but especially you and me.” The shower stall chirped and Lance moved away from the door, choosing to go watch the laundry machine lights cycle so that Keith could have some privacy. “We’re a _team_. We look out for each other. We have each other’s backs. That’s… that’s how it works.”

            “You don’t have to protect me.”

            Lance reverted to his mother tongue to swear virulently. “I. KNOW. But I wanted to, so I did. I know you and Shiro spar a lot, but that wasn’t sparring. He looked like he wanted to take your head off.” The laundry machine dinged and presented a folded stack of clean Keith clothes.

            “That wasn’t really Shiro,” Keith insisted.

            “No, of course not,” he readily agreed, bringing the clothes over. “But he still would’ve…”

            “I took his arm off.” Keith leaned back against the wall of the stall as it chirped at him again to get out.

            “You had to.” Lance offered the stack to him.

            He didn’t take it. “I know.”

            Lance pressed the clothes at his chest and he still didn’t move to take them. He was looking down and to the side, more _through_ the floor than at it.

            “Dammit. C’mere.” He dropped the clothes and stepped into the stall to hug Keith tightly. He felt him tense up like he’d been captured, and then ease down again. After a moment or two, Keith wrapped his arms around him in return. He buried his face against Lance’s neck and they stayed there, ignoring the annoyed chirping of the shower stall and the pile of no-longer-bloody clothes at their feet.

 

**29 Sleep Cycles Ago**

Allura paced in her room under the watchful eyes of the mice. She was facing all the same problems as when Keith had brought Shiro back near death those weeks ago: the additional responsibilities, the loneliness, the worry over the lack of a Black Paladin… but now there were also her fully realized feelings for Shiro. And the way he’d looked at her in the training room, before Pidge had zapped him… It chilled her.

            She kept looking at her hands. She’d never known how Father had put her to sleep all those millennia ago. She hadn’t even tried to figure it out, because it had upset her so much to be put out like that; why would she ever do it to anyone else? She’d thought about it once or twice, because being able to knock Shiro out when he was having a particularly bad dream would’ve been more efficient than staying up and talking him through it or else easing him back into sleep with her energy transference. But she just… couldn’t. To entirely take away his choice in the matter? The Galra had done enough of that sort of thing to him.

            And then she had. She wasn’t really sure how she’d done it; it was a panicked response to his attack. And she was glad she’d done it, because it had prevented so much more misery, but… oh, but it hurt. It hurt to have to do it; it hurt that it was necessary. The fire in his eyes, the pain in his voice, the blood on the floor. She’d had to prioritize. She had to make those choices, and she’d make them all again if she had to, the exact same way. But she’d hurt Shiro badly in the process, and that, in turn, hurt her.

            Sacrifice, yes. Always it came down to that. But only in service to a purpose. Some good had to come of it, or it was worthless. And, in a way, it wasn’t really Shiro who’d been hurt. Because Shiro – the Shiro she knew – would never have done any of that. He would never even try to hurt her or any of the paladins.

            She sat on the bed and closed her eyes, pulling up happier memories: the timbre of his laugh, the crinkle of his eyes when he smiled, the softly contented moans he made sometimes during intense kissing sessions. He was so gentle with her in those moments: not the soldier the Garrison had trained, not the weapon the Galra had attempted to make, and not even the paladin she’d required him to be. Her eyes opened upon an empty room, save for the mice in her lap. She scratched behind their ears and smiled sadly at them. The universe needed the paladin and the soldier, but she wanted to see the gentle man again, and soon. And, hopefully, never again the weapon.

 

**26 Sleep Cycles Ago**

 

            In the first day after The Incident, Allura spent a lot of time alone. Coran couldn’t blame her for that. He didn’t have time to blame her anyway, as he and Pidge were poring over every scrap of data they could get on Shiro’s arm, now (rather messily) detached. Hunk had offered occasional help, but mostly it’d been Coran and Number Five working together on the analysis. Now, it was time to update everyone on what they’d found.

            With everyone gathered around, Coran cleared his throat. He noticed no one wanted to look directly at what had once been Shiro’s arm. “Well, let’s start with the fact that this a-… that it’s essentially Altean.”

            “What?!” They were all shocked, but none moreso than Allura.

            “But he got that while he was imprisoned by the Galra!” Keith protested.

            Coran shook his head. “Yes, but… well, Galra tech _has_ advanced since we’ve last seen it, and part of that is that, fundamentally, it’s very, very similar to the Altean technology of ten thousand years ago.”

            “Basically,” Pidge put in, “we think the Galra stole or at the very least used Altean tech as the basis to upgrade their own technology and then, after that, well, it’s just been ten thousand years of advancement.”

            “And interweaving with Galra magic,” Coran put in. “Which is another thing.”

            “The arm’s riddled with it, like we saw before, but I think I found out why Allura’s energy transference has the effect on it that it does.” Pidge turned and punched up some data. They were on the bridge, so she put it up on the main screen for all to see. “This wave pattern is the wave pattern of the Galra energy stored in the arm. It’s a little low because it’s no longer hooked up to its main power source.” She cleared her throat, but before she could go on, Hunk interrupted her.

            “Meaning Shiro, right?”

            “Yes,” she acknowledged, and pressed on past the unpleasant topic. “Anyway, this is an Altean energy sample I took from Coran.” A new wave pattern blinked in just below the first one.

            “So?” Lance asked.

            “If I slow Coran’s sample down to the same level…” She pressed a button and, as the pattern slowed, she moved the two images to overlap. Coran kept his eyes on Allura and the paladins, because he already knew the result: they were almost identical. Everyone gasped.

            “Are you saying that Galra magic is _also_ Altean?” Allura asked, sounding almost offended.

            “Whatever’s in Shiro’s arm is, well… corrupted Altean quintessence,” Coran told her, hoping to calm her down.

            “’Altered’ would be a less biased term,” Pidge said.

            “No, I like ‘corrupted’,” Lance said.

            Keith nodded. “Yeah, me, too.”

            “Like, I get where you’re coming from, totally,” Hunk said, “but… yeah, ‘corrupted’ does kind of make me feel a lot better.” And Pidge shrugged and gave up that fight.

            “So when Allura was using her energy transference on the arm, it locked up because it didn’t know how to react to the similar-but-different energy it was getting.”

            “Basically, you were temporarily ‘cleansing’ the Galra energy,” Coran told the princess.

            “So what does this have to do with Shiro going nuts?” Keith asked.

            Pidge shut the screen down. “Well, it’s just a hypothesis, but this corrupted quintessence was feeding into Shiro’s system. It was likely interfering with his own.”

            “He’s had the arm for a while now,” Lance commented, “so why is it just _now_ making him lose it?”

            “Again, _just a hypothesis_ ,” she emphasized, “but I think it takes time to effect significant change. He’s generating his own quintessence, as all living beings do; the Galra energy had to override and corrupt it.”

            “It’s also possible that the harder and faster his blood pumped, the more the corrupted energy was able to get into his bloodstream to affect him,” Coran suggested. “Every battle, every training session, every nightmare he woke screaming from, every time he got worked up over _anything_ …” He tried very hard not to look at Allura, but she seemed to get the idea anyway and she frowned.

            “It all accelerated the process, just a little. I’m sure if he’d stayed a Galra prisoner, with all the gladiator battles they were putting him through…”

            “Training and conversion all at the same time,” Keith muttered darkly.

            “So it really _was_ turning him into a Galra?” Lance asked weakly.

            “Eh, not literally,” Coran told him. “But it was getting him into a more Galra-esque mindset, molding him into something more like what they wanted.”

            “A weapon,” Allura whispered, sounding hollow.

            Hunk was trying to find the silver lining. “So it’s a good thing we got it off him, yeah?”

            “Yes, but there’s still a problem,” Coran pointed out.

            Pidge picked up the thread again. “We don’t know if the cryo-replenisher can deal with the Galra quintessence already in Shiro’s system. As long as it’s still in him, we don’t know that there’ll be any change, even with the arm gone. He can’t get _worse_ without the arm, but he also can’t get better.”

            “I’ve gone in to check on him and the pod’s having trouble with figuring out how injured he is. It’s not the arm itself; it has to be the corrupted quintessence in him. He needs to have his blood cleansed. If it were a normal infection,” he informed them all, “the pod could handle it. But it doesn’t know what to do or how to do it here. It’s all quintessence; the pod was never meant to separate out different types of life energy from one another.”

            “So, we’re going to have to figure out how to build a machine to cleanse corrupted quintessence from Shiro,” Pidge explained. “And, of course, build him a new arm.”

            “Oh, that’s the easy part,” Hunk put in. “I can do that. And I’ll help with the whole quintessence-cleanser machine thing, but…”

            “…you don’t know where to start?” Pidge finished for him. “Yeah, neither do I.”

            “Fortunately, I do!” Coran put in with a thin smile. “On how to start, anyway. How to cleanse quintessence specifically, well, that’s a bit stickier, but I can design a decent blood cleanser, I think. It’s probably just a matter of the right filter.”

            “And that’s the hard part,” Allura said. Coran and Pidge both nodded, and she sighed. “Well, what can we do to help?”

            “We need parts,” Coran said. “The Castle only has so much, and… well, we need to repair a cryo-pod while we’re at it. Parts for the arm, the pod, _and_ an entirely new device?” He shook his head. “We’re decently stocked, but we still have limits.”

            “Alright. Where do we need to go?” the princess asked determinedly.

            “Well, the bad news is that most places with the parts we need are run by the Galra or only take GAC, regardless of who’s running them.”

            “Which is not something we have.”

            “There is good news!” Pidge reminded him.

            “Oh, yes, there is! I found an abandoned Kideali space station.”

            “You’re _sure_ it’s abandoned?” Hunk asked warily.

            “Well, it’s been ripped in half, so yes, I’m pretty sure.”

            “Ripped?” Lance asked. “What could do that?”

            “Well, ‘ripped’ might not be the correct term. ‘Sundered’, maybe? ‘Explosively decompressed’? Um…”

            “Everyone on it is either dead or gone,” Keith summarized. “Okay. We got it.”

            “The Kideali are known for being excellent traders and merchants, especially of technology and mechanical parts. Conquered by the Galra now, so an active station would probably require GAC, but lucky us, there’s this abandoned one!”

            “You sure it isn’t already picked over?” Keith asked. “In ten thousand years, I doubt we’d be the first ones to come across it.”

            “Oh, I don’t think it’s ten thousand years old itself,” Coran assured him.

            “And even if it has been looted, it’s at least somewhere to start looking,” Pidge explained. “Also, we can further dismantle it for parts; looters would probably just take what wasn’t nailed down and bolt.”

            “Worth a shot,” Hunk agreed.

            Allura nodded. “I think so, too.”

            “Oh, good, because I already laid in a course for it,” Coran said with an innocent smile. “Haven’t started us on it, but it’s programmed up and ready to go.”

            Allura went straight to the navigation, pulled up the plotted course… and frowned. “Coran, this is the long way around, isn’t it? We don’t have time to go sightseeing.”

            “Yes, Princess, I know, but… well…” He went to his console and highlighted a few things on the shorter course that she was showing on her screen. “See these? Those are Galra checkpoints.”

            “Ohhhhhhhh,” the paladins all said in realization.

            “Yeah, let’s not go there,” Hunk put in.

            “Also means we need to be careful with our wormhole jumps; they’ll spot us more easily if we’re flashy about it. But once we’re past these sectors, we can jump straight there. It’s just going to take us a bit to get around there.”

            Allura sighed. “Fine. Lock us in and let’s go,” she said.

            “Aye, princess.”

 

**22 Sleep Cycles Ago**

            Allura watched the four lions take off. Coran was going over with Pidge to help identify the parts they would need. Hunk was going to help carry and possibly disassemble any larger pieces they might find. Lance and Keith were going… well, probably just to feel like they were doing something, she supposed.

            She brought up the feed from the infirmary: Shiro in his cryo-pod, again, the readout still flashing in confusion. _One of these days, we’re going to figure out how to keep you out of there_.

 

            They flew in to the space station wreckage. The station wasn’t entirely blown in half, but there was a long, wide gash through the center, making it look like some sort of dead creature, save for the few intact solar panels that were still taking in rays from the nearby star, working diligently to provide power for nothing and no one. Lance and Keith landed on one side; Hunk brought down Goldie right next to the Green Lion on the other. “Let’s find what we need and get out, okay? I’m already getting the creeps from this place,” he said with a shudder.

            “Stop being such a baby, Hunk,” Lance chided.

            “We should be as quick as possible, though,” Coran said, pointing out that, “Just because we’re not in a heavily-occupied sector doesn’t mean someone – like the Galra – might not show up at some point.”

            “The sooner we get these parts back to the ship, the sooner we can work on getting Shiro fixed up,” Pidge said.

            “Turn on your visor overlays,” Coran suggested, “and if you see something you think might be what we need, let me know. My helmet will display it for me and I can tell you if we need it. Keep your eyes peeled! Get as many parts as you can; there’s no such thing as too many!”

            “See, you say that, but actually, there was this one time –” Hunk started.

            “Later, Hunk,” Keith groused.

            Hunk pouted as he activated the helmet’s full mask. His chair slid back from the control sticks. “Spoilsport.”

            “Hunk and I will take this side of the station with Coran; you two can take that side,” Pidge said. “Just so long as you don’t spend all your time making out.”

            “We’re not going to… do that!” Keith sputtered. “We’re on a mission here, Pidge.”

            “I know it’s hard to believe,” Lance replied, “but Keith actually _does_ have the self-control to keep his hands off me.” Keith was muttering dark deprecations in his boyfriend’s direction, especially when Lance added in, “Sometimes.”

            Hunk snickered and used his jetpack to steer his way into the center gash of the station. “Okay, okay, let’s just do this.”

            The interior of the station was cold and dark on either side of the center rift. _Okay, this isn’t going to be a big deal. Big empty house in space, and noooooobody’s home. And Pidge and Coran’ll be with you the whole time. Oooh man, I do not like this though._ He watched Lance and Keith come in, and then Pidge bringing in Coran.

            “Keep in touch,” Keith said as he and Lance went off in one direction, leaving him with Coran and Pidge. _Stay safe, guys._

            “Okay, let’s go shopping!” Pidge said with an almost manic grin.

            Hunk chuckled a little; her obvious joy didn’t get rid of his unease, but it helped push it aside. “You are _really_ looking forward to this.”

            “You bet I am!” She led the way in the opposite direction. “Alien tech, Hunk! This is the sort of stuff I used to dream about as a kid!”

            “Not as good as Altean tech, of course,” Coran sniffed. “Just… different.”

            “No, no, Altean tech is great,” Pidge agreed quickly, “but it’s always cool to find something new. Or, at least, new to me.” She was rubbing her hands together in glee.

            Hunk was keeping his eyes peeled. They were using their jetpacks in short, controlled bursts to steer them through the station’s husk. “Man, I hate zero G.”

            “It’s quite nice once you get used to it,” Coran opined.

            “If you say so. I’d rather have my feet on the ground.” The corridor was so lifeless and empty, which was, of course, part of the point, but it set Hunk on edge. “I wonder what happened here.”

            “Something ruptured?” Pidge guessed.

            “Uh, then do we really want whatever parts might still be here? If they were bad enough to blow up back then, how much better are they going to be now?”

            Coran sighed. “I keep telling you, this station is not ten thousand years old. Looking around at it, I’d say the damage is a bit more recent. Maybe the last couple of decades or so?”

            “Twenty year old parts aren’t much better,” Hunk hedged.

            “Well, as the old saying goes, ‘Better half a wytael than a full one’.”

            “Okay, one of these days, you’re going to have to explain what all these things mean,” Lance’s voice complained over the comms.

            “Oh, well, a wytael is a particularly nasty creature that…”

            Coran was interrupted by a pale flickering …person?... who suddenly appeared right in front of them. It was short, only barely taller than Pidge, wearing what looked like a really, _really_ old-fashioned diving suit from Earth: the bulky kind with the bubble helmet, except this one was transparent and showed a sort of weasel-like face. Its mouth moved and it raised a gloved hand – or paw, really; it looked like it had long talons or claws on the end of its three fingers – towards them. It looked plaintive and pained.

            Hunk screamed and tried to backpedal, but he didn’t have gravity to help him flee. It wound up not mattering; the diver-weasel disappeared again almost immediately.

            “Hunk?!” Keith yelled over the comms. “What happened?!”

            “What WAS that?” Pidge asked.

            “Well, it looked like a Kideali,” Coran said, “but they don’t usually just… pop in and out like that.”

            They were silent for a long time. And then Pidge piped up with, “Pop goes the weasel?” and Hunk burst out laughing. He could hear Pidge snickering, Keith and Lance asking what was so funny, and Coran wanting to know what a ‘weasel’ was. It was a relief to laugh.

            He felt a little better, even if he still wanted to know what was going on. “So… what were the Kideali like, besides mechanical merchant, um, people? Like… they weren’t mean or anything, right?”

            Coran went into Helpful Educator mode. “Well, away from their home planet, they always wore those suits you saw that one in. We’d try to tell them they didn’t have to wear the suits all the time, or that they could wear less heavy and awkward ones, but they always refused. Said they worked just fine for them and they were comfortable enough and wouldn’t take them off. The helmet distorted their voices though; made them echo a bit.”

            “Help-p-p us-s-s…” moaned a squeaky sounding echo.

            “Yes, like that! Good job, Pidge. It’s almost like you’ve heard a Kideali speak before.”

            “I didn’t say it!” she squeaked.

             She and Coran both looked at Hunk and he shook his head vigorously. “Don’t look at me!”

            “Then what…?” But Coran didn’t get a chance to finish the question. Another glowing white Kideali appeared before them, clawed hands reaching for Pidge. She shrieked and swung her bayard at it, even as Coran yelled, “No! Don’t!” But her katar went straight through without resistance, and the Kideali disappeared.

            “GHOST WEASELS!” Hunk shouted.

            Lance’s voice crackled over the comms dryly, “Oh great, Hunk’s lost it.”

            “Are you guys not seeing these things?” he asked.

            “I see a whole lot of nothing,” Lance told him. “Settle down.”

            “Well, over here we have ghost wea-…er, Kideali,” he amended as Pidge shot him a glare.

            “They’re _not_ ghosts,” she insisted. “Ghosts aren’t real.”

            “I would’ve said the same thing about aliens not long ago,” Lance piped up.

            “Yeah, but that’s _you_. And aliens are a _totally_ different thing than ghosts. The Drake Equa-”

            “Uh, guys?” Hunk interrupted, before Pidge could get going on her cackling refutations of the Fermi paradox _AGAIN_. It’d been good for a laugh the first few times, but it was starting to wear thin after a hundred-some-odd repetitions. “Can we just get what we need and get out of here? Whatever they are, they’re creeping me out.”

            “Hunk’s right,” Keith said. “Let’s focus up. We’re not doing Shiro any good wandering around babbling about ghosts.”

            “I’m not babbling! And Hunk started it!”

            “GUYS,” Hunk pleaded.

            “Come on!” Coran said, sounding chipper despite being on a station full of ghost weasels. “Now, we need a flux incapacitor, at least two sonar reflux modulators, some nanodioxin ventilators, and as many quadlithium trion batteries as we can get away with! Never can have enough of those; seems like you’re always running out at the worst times.”

            “Yeah, I’ve been meaning to ask about the power storage the Castle and the Lions use, because that’s been one of Earth’s biggest technological bottlenecks…” Aaaaand Pidge and Coran were off and talking about batteries. Normally Hunk would’ve been super interested, but he was keeping an eye out as they floated through the station’s main corridor. Occasionally, a flash of white would catch the corner of his eye and he’d whip his head in that direction only to find nothing there. It didn’t matter that they hadn’t tried to hurt anyone (yet); it was just too creepy to think about the souls of the dead trapped forever in this empty relic, suffering alone and unloved…

            Keith screamed over the comms.

            “What is it?! Keith?! You okay??” Hunk asked immediately.

            “GHOST WEASEL!” Lance howled.

            “TOLD YOU!” Pidge crowed smugly.

            “They’re not whatever these ‘weasel’ things are,” Coran reminded him. “They’re Kideali.”

            “THEY’RE OLD-TIMEY DIVING WEASELS,” Lance declared.

            “And they’re DEAD,” Hunk reminded Coran.

            “It’s gone, I’m fine,” Keith was saying, but he sounded a bit shaky to Hunk. “It just surprised me.”

            “They can’t hurt you,” Pidge said, taking on Hunk’s voice of reason role for a change. Which, y’know, that was fine; she could have it right now, because he just wanted to get out of here.

            “Look, they haven’t hurt anyone _yet_ , but that doesn’t mean they _can’t_ ,” Hunk pointed out. “I mean, think about it: if your soul was trapped for eternity in some floating space junk, wouldn’t you get a little ticked off after twenty years? Or ten thousand? However long it’s been?”

            “It has been 33.431 years since last access,” a squeaky disembodied voice informed him. Hunk’s eyes widened as he looked at Coran and Pidge. They looked right back at him, and then another ghostly Kideali appeared in front of him. This one wasn’t pure white: it had light gray fur and its suit was clearly beige. The lights on it – merry red and green – blinked on and off steadily. But it crackled and popped and occasionally distorted. Its dark little eyes looked straight ahead. “It is good to see sentient life again.”

            “It’saghostweasellllllll,” Hunk hissed. “It can SEE US.”

            “Calm down, Hunk,” Pidge told him.

            “Try and ask it where these flux things Coran needs are,” Keith advised him over the comms.

            “Diplomacy first,” Coran protested.

            Hunk tried to take the middle ground. He understood the need to be diplomatic and all that, but he wanted to leave so very badly. “Um, hi. Look, we don’t mean to butt in here, but we’re looking for… what was it again, Coran?”

            Coran read off his list. The Kideali remained looking straight ahead and didn’t move aside from fading and crackling occasionally. Finally, it spoke. “That is quite a list you have there. I am not sure we can accommodate you. I am unfortunately unable to access the vendor inventory lists.”

            “It’s not a ghost!” Pidge declared triumphantly. “It’s an AI! It’s…” she laughed a little, “it’s a mall directory AI!”

            “We’re in a space mall?” Lance asked.

            “Oh good,” Hunk said, easing down. “Ask it where the food court is.”

            “Hunk,” she chided gently.

            “But seriously, if that’s the directory AI, then what were the other things?” he wanted to know.

            “Hunk’s right!” Lance, as always, had his back. “Just ‘cause you found one non-ghost, doesn’t mean the other ones _weren’t_ ghosts! This is totally a haunted space mall.”

            “That doesn’t change anything,” Keith said. “We still have to find what we need and get it back to the Castle. Get back to searching.”

            Hunk frowned. He thought he saw another ghost weasel, but again, it was gone by the time he looked toward it. “Okay, okay. We gotta do this, and I get that, but I seriously am freaked out by the ghost weasels. Kideali. Whatever.”

            Pidge sighed heavily. “I’ll go ‘ghost-hunting’ if you and Coran want to start trying to find the parts we need.”

            “Are you sure you should do that on your own?”

            “I ain’t afraid of no ghost,” she informed them with a grin, before adding, “And DON’T start singing, Lance.”

            “Awwwww!”

            “Save it for serenading your boyfriend,” she teased.

            “Can you all just get on with it?” Keith retorted. Hunk could practically hear him blushing over the comms.

            “Yeah, yeah, I’m on it.” Pidge picked a direction to start investigating.

            “C’mon, Hunk. Those flux incapacitors don’t find themselves!”

            “Too bad.” He followed Coran as they floated deeper into the haunted space mall.

 

            Pidge poked her head in room after room until she found something that looked like it might be a control center of some sort: panels in front of a bank of dark screens, and a couple of knocked over chairs. Maybe it was security, not command, but it was a better place to start than the obvious storerooms she’d been going through. She went in to investigate further, careful of the floating chairs. When she expected zero G, it was actually kind of fun (and it helped that she had a method of controlled propulsion this time). She caught herself on the edge of a panel and tried to figure out what all the buttons, knobs, switches, and levers did.

            The panel looked like a mishmash of different tech levels. _Guess they really didn’t like upgrading. ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ sort of thing. I can get behind that._ But maaaan, some of this stuff was old even by Earth standards. Fortunately, that meant she had some idea of how it worked. _Now if I could just read the labels_. What wasn’t faded away to near-nothing was in Kidealish? Kidealese? Weasel words? She chuckled to herself as she tried to suss out which controls did what.

            She decided to try pushing the largest button on the panel, and the screens above crackled to life. Most of the screens showed empty parts of the station, but two of them showed her teammates. _Okay, security feed. Is that all this room did, or can we do more here?_ She looked down at the panel again, trying to figure out how she’d design this if it were up to her. _Nngh. This is where Hunk would be useful._ But she knew she’d get it eventually; she didn’t want to delay the actual mission any more than they had to.

            Movement caught the corner of her eye and she looked up at the screens. Had there been someone in one of those empty corridors? Just for a moment? But there was no one there now. Hunk and Coran were still doing okay, as were Keith and Lance. Everyone was fine. _That AI really shook us. But ghosts aren’t real._ Not like aliens, after all. She returned to the panel.

            _Sure, there was that other one, the all-white one. Two, I guess. There were two of them. But it was probably the AI trying to come on and having trouble launching properly. After 33.431 years, it’s going to have some kinks. I’m surprised it still has_ power _, but then if it has these quadlithium trion batteries Coran was telling us about plus those still functioning solar panels…_

Again, on another screen: the flash of white there and gone before she could catch it. She stopped what she was doing and watched the screens for a long time. Keith and Lance were, in fact, behaving and even finding a few parts. Or so she thought, until Lance picked up something and started pretending it was a person. He was making it “talk” to Keith, who must not have liked what it said, because he grabbed it and threw it as hard as he could. Lance pouted as they floated off again. _This is hitting Keith pretty hard. He and Shiro were…_ are _close._

            She didn’t like it any better herself. She hadn’t been the one to cut his arm off, but she’d tased him into submission twice. Shiro was like family to her, too. And the thought that the Galra could… could basically _infect_ you like that made her shudder. She wanted to thank Shiro even more now for what he’d done to get Matt away from the arena, away from the druids’ hands. It wasn’t a guarantee that they hadn’t experimented on him, but it was more likely that he was safer in some far-off work camp.

            _THERE!_ She quite clearly saw a “ghost weasel” appear on one of the screens. It looked like sobs were wracking its thin body in its oversized suit, shoulders shaking, mouth open in a silent cry. And then it was gone again. _Okay, that’s_ not _the AI glitching out._ At least, she couldn’t think of a reason to have an AI that looked like it was having a breakdown of some sort, unless that was a sign of distress from an extremely advanced intelligence there, but that was getting into something a little too akin to “ghosts” anyway.

            She eyed the panel and started trying different button and lever combinations, constantly checking screens and the area around her for (A) any effects of her experiments and (B) any further sign of “ghosts.” After extensive testing, she’d figured out:

  * How to turn on the lights (which Hunk especially appreciated),
  * How to power up certain systems (gravity and life support were both no-go with the station broken open as it was),
  * And how to find an inventory list of what the station had at the time of its destruction (which she fed to the boys to help them in their searching).



            She was still experimenting with different switches and dials when the AI Kideali fzzed back into existence next to her. She would’ve jumped aside if it were possible in zero G. “May I be of service?”

            She studied it for a moment. _I guess that last button must’ve done it._ She wasn’t sure the AI would know what “ghosts” meant if she asked about those. Instead, she asked, “What happened here?”

            “You might need to be more specific,” it said apologetically.

            “I want all information from the twenty-four hours preceding station shutdown, 33.431 years ago.”

            She should’ve asked for a shorter time frame. The AI proceeded to tell her all about every ship that docked, its cargo manifest and crew roster, the Point of Sale purchases, inventory lists, and bank account fluctuations throughout the station’s vendors. Just when she was about to tell it to stop while she figured out how best to filter her search request, the AI said, “…and then there was the attack.”

            “Attack?”

            “The Galra Empire attacked the station because it serviced ships known to be in open rebellion against them during their expansion in this sector. All ships docked here were destroyed, and the station suffered a massive hull breach. Main power was lost, and the station’s functions were diverted to standby power, only to be accessed on an as-needed basis. My records are incomplete from this point. I can pull up the related security footage, if you wish?”

            “Yes, please, but leave this screen and that screen,” she pointed to the ones that showed her friends, “on their current feeds, please.”

            The AI made a displeased noise. “I will shift those displays to screens Ee and Ea,” it informed her, as it moved those feeds to the top two screens. Pidge honestly couldn’t tell the difference in the sounds, but whatever; she could still keep an eye on the guys. The rest of the screens filled with recorded footage from the Galra attack.

            The Galra had stormed the station through the breach. Those who surrendered were captured; anyone who showed the slightest bit of resistance was killed. Pidge watched innocent merchants and their families slaughtered at the hands of the Galra and felt herself fill with rage. But then… “Wait! This screen here!”

            “Screen Hs?”

            “Uh, yes. Hiss. Go back and play it again.”

            “How far?”

            “Five …ticks,” she corrected herself. And it rewound and replayed. “I’ve seen that before. Go back ten, no… twenty ticks.” And there it was: the Kideali that had asked for help, the one she’d tried to slash with her bayard. It made the same gestures, the same mouth movements; aside from the fact that it was in color, it was exactly the same, right up until a Galra soldier showed up and blasted the poor creature. “I’ve seen this before! This… this Kideali!”

            “The station’s records of this time are fragmented,” the AI apologized again. “But it was set to record on an individual level station-wide shortly after the Galra attacked.”

            “What do you mean ‘on an individual level’?”

            “This station’s security systems can track an individual through the station, through every action they take, if set to that level of scrutiny. Usually this is used on one person at a time, typically suspected thieves, to trace their paths and what they may have done with any stolen goods they have acquired. Station security set the entire station to record every resident and visitor’s actions during the attack. But the records are fragmented.”

            “Holy Schottky,” Pidge breathed. “They _are_ ghosts. Not in the literal sense, not like dead souls, but these are the last moments of these peoples’ lives, and they’re just… trapped.”  She looked at the screens again, and then at the AI. “I wish I could do something, but this was so long ago.”

            “There is nothing to be done,” the AI agreed. “May I be of further service to you?”

            Pidge thought a moment, watching the Galra storm through the station. She frowned, thinking back to the picture she had of her and Matt. “Is there a way to download the station’s records? I’d like to take them with me.” She looked back at her friends in the present, then the station residents in the past. “All of them.”

            “Yes. Download of all station records will take time, but it can be done.”

            “I’ll wait,” she said grimly.

            Coran looked over the haul from the Kideali station. They’d had a good stock of ventilators, and some quadlithium trion batteries were able to be salvaged. The reflux modulators had seen better days, but he could get them working again. The only flux incapacitor they’d been able to find was so old and clunky that he would normally not have bothered, but they’d just have to be glad for the half wytael they had, wouldn’t they?

            Knowing that the Kideali – at least some of them – had fought against the Galra was both the best and the worst of what came back with them. Pidge had explained about the data she’d collected and what it entailed. The station had used data storage that was outdated even thirty-three years ago, and Allura had enclosed the data dot in her palm and held it over her heart when she learned what was on it. “We will not forget you or your sacrifice,” she’d whispered.

            On one hand, this was what a paladin should do. Pidge had done a fine job, and everyone (especially Hunk and Lance) were glad to know there weren’t really dead souls haunting them. On the other hand, Coran didn’t like the princess holding on to further burdens like that. He worried over her, as he always had. There was a reason he’d been the one to go into cryostasis, to watch over and protect her since her father would be unable to.

            But it was hard to deny that she was every inch her father’s daughter. She did everything wholeheartedly with all the passion and energy her youth could provide. King Alfor had been tempered by time and tragedy by the time of his death, but before that, his wife had been the steadying hand that guided him, that provided necessary respite, that reminded him to take care of himself. Allura needed that. Not necessarily a spouse, per se, but she had to have someone who was willing to stand up and remind her that she had limits.

            Coran tried to do some of that for her. Sometimes she listened to him and his concerns, but more often she tsked and called him a “nanny.” Shiro had been able to get through to her with better (or at least more frequent) success than he’d managed, but Shiro was not an option at the moment.

            Well, there was no help for it. He’d do the best he could, even if that meant being teased by Allura for his concern over her, and focus on doing what he could to get Shiro back. Feelings for him aside, Allura was worrying over the same thing he was: Shiro was one-fifth of Voltron, in some ways the most vital part as the Black Paladin and leader of the team. And what would happen if…?

            He didn’t want to think about it. He had too much else to worry about right now, and fretting over this wasn’t going to help. He set to work on the blood cleanser, and on repairing and cleaning up the parts they’d gotten so they could be of use in it. It was all he could do, aside from breathing a quick thank you in remembrance of the Kideali who’d lost their lives fighting the Galra.

**20 Sleep Cycles Ago**

“…and that’s what you’ve missed out on,” Allura finished up. She was sitting on the steps again, leaning against the side of Shiro’s cryo-pod. “The only other thing to say is how much I miss you. Like last time, I suppose. I wish you’d wake up to hear me this time.

            “But when you wake up, I want it to be _you_. You weren’t you when you did all of that. I know that. Keith and Pidge know that. We all know it. I miss you so much, Shiro, and this isn’t just about the pressures of leadership this time. It _is_ tiring, and I _do_ miss having your support, but it’s more than that.”

            She stood and resumed pacing. “I miss your voice more than anything, I think. Just hearing you speak, even when you’re not talking to me, it’s… reassuring. I miss the way you say my name when we’re alone. I miss your smiles and your laughs. Did you know you smile differently when the others aren’t around? You do. It’s cozy. Is that the word I want? I’m not sure how to describe it.

            “I miss the way you kiss me. I… I don’t think it’ll ever mean the same thing to me that it does to you, but I lo- …enjoy how much you enjoy it. And it does have its moments.” She blushed recalling some of them. Even with no one else to truly hear her, she was unwilling to say them out loud. “With you, anyway. I can’t imagine ever kissing anyone else. I can’t imagine ever wanting to.”

            She sighed and came over to rest her hand on the side of the pod. The readout was still flashing in confusion as to his healing status, but he was in stasis at this point. He would stay there until awoken. “I wish I could let you out, but I can’t until I know it’s _you_ again. I don’t want the Galra weapon to come out of there. I don’t want to let you out until we have a solution, until I know we can make everything better.”

            The ship beeped a reminder at her. “I have to go; it’s almost time for my watch. Thank you for listening, as always.” She leaned her forehead against the cool shield of the cryo-pod and closed her eyes. “Please come back to me.” She stayed there for the span of one long breath, then turned and walked out of the infirmary and back to her responsibilities.

**15 Sleep Cycles Ago**

            Allura waited for her paladins – well, most of them – to file onto the bridge. “What’s up?” Hunk asked. She nodded at Coran who punched up what they’d found on the main screen.

            “This planet is fairly similar to Earth, from our measurements,” she informed them. “Medium-sized, slightly more water than land, same sort of atmospheric mix, etc. What’s interesting about it is that it shouldn’t exist.” She pulled up the star map and enlarged a section of it. “This is where we’ve found it, but as you can see, there’s nothing.”

            “Is it a recent formation?” Pidge asked.

            Coran sniffed as if insulted. “We _are_ updating the maps, thank you. In fact, I was running the long-range sensors specifically for that purpose when we found this. And according to our scans, it’s much, much older than ten thousand years.”

            “I think we should take a look,” Allura told them. “Hiding a Galra transportation hub is one thing, but an entire planet?”

            “There’s just one tiny catch,” Coran said, and the map shifted to a deep purple. “This is, to the best of our knowledge, Imperial territory. They’re well-entrenched here.”

            There was a chorus of mealy-mouthed disagreement from the paladins there; none of them thought they should go, but they were refusing to say so outright. It annoyed Allura more when they wouldn’t speak up than it would have if they’d expressed their dissent. _This is where Shiro would be useful_. She shoved that aside and nodded at Coran again. He put the planet in its coordinates on the star map and it was most decidedly _not_ purple.

            “Why do you think it hasn’t been conquered by the Galra?” Pidge asked. “It’s in the middle of deep Galra space.”

            Allura’d been hoping that little reveal would inspire some curiosity. Pidge was especially good for speaking up if she was intrigued by something. _Anything to get them to speak their minds._ “Because we never received a distress beacon from this location. We didn’t know it existed. And if _we_ don’t know it exists, then perhaps the Galra don’t either.”

            “I dunno, Princess,” Keith said, narrowing his eyes distrustfully at the star map, as if it were somehow in league with Zarkon, “it’s going to be dangerous getting there, and if something goes wrong, we won’t have Voltron to deal with it.”

            “Perhaps,” she agreed, trying not to look as nervous as she felt. This was the part she was really worried about. “But if it comes to that, then I will pilot the Black Lion.”

            She’d never heard such a complete silence in her life.

            “Only until Shiro’s well again, of course,” she added. “It’s his lion, now moreso than ever. But the universe needs Voltron, so we have to at least try. And this,” she gestured to the planet, a shining aqua color in a sea of Galra purple, “is worth the risk. At a minimum, this is our best hiding place from the Galra while we work on recovering Shiro.”

            “Minimum?” Lance asked. “What else does this place have going for it?”

            She looked to Coran who cleared his throat. “My grandfather used to tell me stories – ”

            The paladins all groaned.

            He continued as if he hadn’t heard, “ – about a mythical planet, lost to all except the pure of heart. The home of the Goddess of the Universe, from whom all life and magic sprang forth.”

            Allura shot a look at Lance, practically _daring_ him to comment. She didn’t believe in the old stories as much as Coran tended to, but she was not about to have her friend and advisor mocked at the moment. Lance seemed to think better of whatever it was he was about to say and Allura eased down.

            “It might be just a story to you,” she informed them all, “but if this planet truly has some sort of connection to things beyond the realm of science,” Pidge groaned, but Allura ignored her, “then it’s worth checking into, for Shiro’s sake if nothing else.”

            “I still have no idea how to filter Galra quintessence from Shiro’s,” Coran reminded them.

            “I suppose it’s possible that it’s not really ‘magic,’” Pidge mused aloud, “so much as sufficiently advanced tech. Just like the ghosts on the haunted space mall weren’t literally ghosts, just old memory files.”

            “Maybe it’s super-advanced tech that’s hidden them from the Galra all this time?” Hunk suggested. “Finding out how they do that would be super useful.”

            “Okay, but there’s still the question of getting there,” Keith pointed out.

            “I can fly us there in my lion,” Pidge volunteered.

            “Yeah, but how close can we get the Castle?” Lance asked. “If the point is to hide out on this planet, how are we going to _get_ it there?”

            Allura had already thought of that, of course. “We should take the Green Lion down to investigate. We’ll leave the Castle in a somewhat safer place; it’s a longer flight for the Lion, but I don’t want to take the chance. Once we know it’s safe, then we can figure out how to get the Castle in. It _is_ enemy-held territory but they can’t possibly be patrolling the entire sector at once. There will be cracks we can sneak through.”

            They looked around and shrugged. “Who knows?” Pidge said. “We might find whatever advanced tech is allowing the entire planet to hide. If I can reverse-engineer that, I might be able to finally get a cloaking device powerful and long-lasting enough for the entire Castle.”

            “I don’t know,” Keith mused. “A hidden planet that might have exactly what we need? It sounds like a trap.”

            “It’s an entire _planet_ ,” Lance said. “This isn’t like the Thermian station.”

            “Or the trap with Rolo,” Hunk put in. “There’s no distress beacon. We just found it by looking around.”

            “What are the odds that Zarkon created an entire planet as a trap and just left it out here on the off chance we might stumble across it?” Pidge said.

            “Can Zarkon even _make_ planets?” Hunk asked.

            “We have no proof the Galra even know about this planet’s existence,” Allura pointed out.

            “We have no proof they don’t,” Keith retorted.

            “Well, that’s why we’re taking the Green Lion in first,” Pidge reminded him. “All four of us will go together, so…”

            “Five,” Allura corrected.

            “Oh no,” Keith said immediately. “No, you are _not_ coming with us.”

            She narrowed her eyes at him. “And what makes you think you have the right to tell me what I can or cannot do?”

            “With Shiro out of commission – ” he began.

            “I am still the Princess of Altea. These are still _my people’s_ lions. This is still _my_ Castle.” She held Keith’s gaze.

            “Shiro would say we’re a team,” Pidge reminded them all. “He’d want us to decide together what to do.”

            “Shiro answered to Allura,” Coran countered. “As should all of you.”

            Allura broke Keith’s gaze first, but only so she could sweep her eyes over all of them. “If anyone has a good reason for me not to go, I’m willing to listen. A reason that _isn’t_ ‘oh, we must protect the princess as if she’s some sort of fragile doll’, because I think we all know by now that I am no such thing.”

            She waited for someone to say something. No one spoke up, and she was about to declare the matter settled when Keith interjected, “Shiro wouldn’t want you to go.”

            She sighed harshly. “Are you so sure about that? You were all very surprised he had no problem with my going into the Galra transportation hub.”

            “And look how that turned out!”

            “I am going,” she informed him. “Shiro’s objection would not stop me and neither will yours.”

            “If you get hurt down there – ”

            She cut him off. “Keith, are your objections based on my relationship with Shiro?”

            He frowned. “So what if they are?”

            “I am still my own person, Keith. I do not need to be safeguarded. It’s little different from you and Lance both going into danger. You don’t protest that, do you?”

            “No, but I’ll be right there to protect him!”

            “Hey!” Lance shot back. “ _I_ need protection?! Since when?”

            “Since always!”

            “I should be protecting you! YOU’RE the one always running off into stupidly dangerous situations!”

            “You’re the one who trusts complete strangers way too easily!”

            “SHUT UP!” Pidge yelled. “I agree with the Princess. We need a leader, especially when you two start in on … THAT,” she gestured to the two of them and their recent argument. “Shiro trusts Allura, and so do I.”

            “Yeah, guys, it’ll be fine. I hope,” Hunk put in.

            Lance and Keith were still glaring at each other, but neither protested. “I’m so glad that’s finally settled,” she commented dryly. “Now, Coran has found a good place to hide the Castle. Let’s suit up and get down there.

            “And remember, we’re hoping to find something down there we can use to help Shiro. Let’s stick together and focus on that.” They all nodded. _Finally, something we can all agree on._

           

           

            It was beautiful, but it made Hunk miss home. It was so Earth-like, except for the trees with leaves of pink and lavender. Pidge verified the atmosphere was breathable as Green (or whatever Pidge called her lion) brought them in for a landing on a sea of vibrantly green grass. The system’s star was shining bright upon the landscape, but there was a slightly chill breeze as the lion opened its mouth to let them out. “I wonder if it’s autumn here? It feels like autumn. Maybe the leaves turn pink here instead of red?”

            As they stepped out onto the grass, Hunk felt a shiver that had nothing to do with the breeze. It started at his feet and went up through the top of his head. Looking down, he thought he saw a fading glow from the grass he was standing on. “Hey, did anyone else see that?”

            “See what?” Lance asked.

            “Nothing, I guess.” And the cold feeling went away. Even though the breeze still had a bit of a bite to it, he felt warm. He wasn’t sure how to put it other than that it felt like the planet had accepted him somehow. _Almost like Goldie_.

            “It’s lovely,” Allura said, looking out over the unspoiled field ahead of them. “But it’s not getting us answers.”

            “When we were coming in, I spotted something that looks like a building over this way,” Pidge said. “But nothing like a town or a city.”

            “Well, let’s start with what we’ve got,” Allura declared.

            “It’s not close; I didn’t want to land us too near something that might be populated, just in case.”

            “Well, it’s a nice day for a walk, at least?” Hunk offered with a shrug.

            “Let’s go,” Allura insisted. Pidge headed off and the rest of them fell in with her.

            They started out in silence, but gradually camaraderie and boredom prodded them into conversation. Allura kept quiet, Keith watched Allura, and Pidge contributed only occasionally, but Hunk and Lance had a good chat about the possibilities of alien life on this planet, how much it was like Earth, what other kinds of tech they might have, that sort of thing. Aside from the content, it could’ve been any conversation like they’d had back home.

            It was nice to have the reminder that Lance was still his buddy, even with all the time he was spending with Keith anymore. Hunk got it, he understood, and it was never gonna change the fact that he thought of the team as family now, but it was still nice to chit-chat like the old days. _And we are on an **alien** planet. How cool is this? If someone’d told me back when I joined the Garrison that I’d wind up having a casual chat with friends as we strolled along an alien landscape far, far from Earth, I’d’ve thought they were nuts. BUT HERE WE ARE!_

He lost track of time as they talked, until Lance pointed ahead of them. “Whoa, is that it?”

            “No, Lance, it’s some _other_ building out in the middle of nowhere,” Pidge snarked.

            “Yeah, ha ha, but seriously, LOOK AT IT.” And Hunk had to give this one to Lance (as usual): it was a huge marble building – well, it _looked_ like marble – that glinted white in the sun. As they got closer, he could make out ornate columns with flecks of gilt still stubbornly clinging to them here and there. It reminded Hunk of pictures he’d seen of the old Greek and Roman temples back on Earth. He couldn’t remember details of ancient architecture, but the overall shape seemed similar. This building was massive and windowless, and the roof…

            “Whoa,” Hunk said, moving side to side and tilting his head as he walked. “The roof is iridescent. Is that some sort of metal?”

            “It almost looks like… I dunno, like gemstone of some sort?” Pidge suggested. “Like one giant, flat, polished gemstone.”

            “No way.”

            “It lets the light through, I think? I’m not really sure.”

            “Well, we’ll be close enough for you to poke at it soon,” Keith told her.

            “Pidge, you didn’t see any other buildings or signs of civilization near here?” Allura asked her.

            “No. Not a thing. And, y’know, it’s kind of weird, but it felt like… like my lion _wanted_ to come here.”

            “Okay, but that’s at least weird in a good way,” Hunk said. “The lions wouldn’t want us to get hurt, after all.”

            “So is this the Universal Goddess’s house then?” Lance asked.

            “The Goddess of the Universe,” Allura corrected him. “And I suppose we’ll find out.”

            “What’s this goddess supposed to be like?” Keith asked.

            “I don’t know the stories as well as Coran does, but She’s supposed to have created quintessence in all its forms, and to have spread it – and thus the possibility of life – throughout the universe.”

            “Sounds like the exact opposite of Zarkon,” Lance commented. “So maybe that’s a good sign?”

            “Perhaps. On Altea, there was a… a priesthood, I suppose you would say, dedicated to her. But there were a lot of different religions, and just as many people who didn’t worship any of them.”

            “So is this meant to be a temple to her then?” Pidge asked.

            “It really looks like one,” Hunk put in. “I mean, an Earth one. A Greek or Roman Earth one.”

            There were no signs or anything else man- (or alien?)-made around the temple, just stairs leading up to two massive golden doors. “Hey, is that…?” The doors were engraved with what looked like the Voltron V, one arm of the letter on each door.

            “Is it supposed to be like that?”

            “I’m not sure,” Allura admitted. “But perhaps it’s a coincidence.”

            There was a whirr and five holes opened up in the floor: three to the left of the doors and two to the right. Hunk and Pidge peered into them and then jumped back as something started rising out of each of them: smooth, round, made of the same ‘marble’ that the building was clad in.

            “They’re heads!” Hunk declared. “Ew ew ew!”

            “They’re not _real_ heads,” Pidge said. “They’re like statues.” Only, as they rose, the ‘heads’ didn’t appear to have any features. They were definitely shaped like heads, but without anything that defined them as human or Altean or Galra or anything else. There was the vague suggestion of where the eyes should be, cheeks and chins, all the same on each of the five.

            As they rose further, it turned out they were _just_ heads, and each rose to a different height and stopped, hovering there as the tiles slid back into place with a definitive clang. “Um… now what?” Lance asked.

            Pidge eyeballed the floating heads and approached the one that hadn’t risen as high as the others. “Guys, this is my height.”

            Hunk gave them a quick once-over and went to stand next to her to stare into the blank face floating opposite him. “Yeah, I think they’re supposed to be us, somehow?”

            “I have way better cheekbones than this,” Lance said, finding the one that was his height.

            They paired off with their respective heads and waited. “I think they’re waiting for us to do something,” Keith said.

            Hunk considered his floating head. Well, not _his_ floating head, but the one that was floating at his height. “You know, my aunt had something kinda like this. It was a wig stand.” He wiggled and tugged his helmet off and breathed a sigh of relief at being free of it.

            “You sure that’s a good idea?” Pidge asked him.

            “No,” he admitted, and put his helmet on the floating head. There was a faint chime, pleasant and melodious. “But I think it likes it!”

            The others – including Allura – did the same. Each time, there was the same little chime. After the fifth one, Hunk looked at the doors, expecting them to open. But there was no apparent change.

            “Oh, come on!” Keith pushed on one of the doors. Aside from the engraved V they were entirely smooth, so there was nothing to grab onto to pull them. His pushing, however, had no results. “Hunk, come help me with this.”

            Hunk came over and tried to push on the same door. It didn’t budge. It felt like it wasn’t even supposed to move and after several minutes, he gave up. “Are we sure they’re even doors?”

            “Well, they sure look like it,” Lance put in. He walked up to the door next to theirs and knocked twice.

            And they swung open, smoothly and quietly.

            Naturally he grinned at his victory as Keith sighed in annoyance. “Saaaaaaaay it,” Lance demanded.

            “Fine. Good job, Lance.”

            “Oh look, they’ve learned how to play nice,” Pidge cooed.

            “Paladins,” Allura snapped. “Let’s head inside.”

 

 

            The temple interior was dark. It looked like nothing so much as a big lobby as they stepped in. And once everyone was inside, the doors slammed shut behind them. Keith couldn’t help jumping along with the rest of them. At first, the only illumination came from their suit lights until six large gouts of flame roared into being, three along each wall. The only safe spaces to stand were just inside the door and a wide column down the center. But the fire lit up the room, that was for sure – and also let them see the lever on the far wall.

            “Oh great, the place is booby-trapped!” Hunk said. “Just like in Indiana Jones! Or Tomb Raider! Or…”

            “Or pretty much any story with an ancient temple in it,” Pidge said. “Yeah, we got it, Hunk.”

            “What’s the big deal?” Lance asked. “We go over there and flip the switch. There’s plenty of room to walk down the center there.” And he headed straight for the far wall. But he hadn’t taken more than a few steps when the floor started falling away. “WHOOOAAA!!”

            Keith grabbed him by the suit collar and hauled him back before he could fall. There was a well-defined line in the floor that was rather stupidly obvious now. Stepping foot over this line was not encouraged. The next few lines of tiles fell into the pit below them, and a quick look over the edge showed the bottom of the pit to be lined with spikes.

            And then there was a whirr and a whoosh. They all looked up to see a giant bladed pendulum descend from the ceiling until it nearly touched the floor, swinging from side to side between the first and second fire plumes. Just past the second set of fire jets, arrows fired out of the wall at each other from each side.

            “Okay, so that’s the big deal,” Lance said. Keith realized he was still holding onto him and let go reluctantly. “Thanks.”

            “Someone has to protect you,” he pointed out.

            Lance was going to retort, but Allura cut him off. “Not now. We have to figure out how to get across.”

            “Timing the blade swings should be easy enough,” Pidge mused aloud.

            “But it’s big enough that it blocks the whole path,” Hunk pointed out. “The only way around it is through the fire jets.”

            “Timing the arrows will be trickier,” Allura said. “Maybe there’s a hidden switch on this side to shut the whole thing off? And the lever over there is just a diversion? Lance, help me look.”

            Keith watched Lance and the princess feel along walls as Pidge and Hunk discussed and debated how to get around the blade and the arrows. He stared straight ahead. He focused his eyes on the lever on the far side.

            Everyone’s chatter died to white noise. The roar of the flame jets receded so he could prioritize the gentle swish of the giant blade and the _fwip! fwip! fwip!_ of the arrows. He backed away from the edge as he watched and listened. He let the sounds and motions of the traps become his breath and the beat of his heart. His back hit the doors. They didn’t move.

            Lance’s voice said his name, distantly, like in a dream. For Keith, it might as well have been the starter’s gun.

            He ran, ignoring the cries of his fellow paladins, of the princess, and leaped at the last second. His bayard flowed into his hand and became solid, a blade of his own, and he sliced through the pendulum’s rope.

            _Blood, and Shiro screaming…_

            He shoved the memory aside as he fell with the pendulum blade, rolled to his feet, sent his bayard away again, and kept charging straight through the arrows. One went past his nose, and he kept running, feeling the blocks giving way beneath his feet, but he was almost there, he could see a line on the floor on the other side, just in front of the lever and there was nothing but the breakaway floor tiles between him and success.

            …until a large stone cube fell from the ceiling. Keith saw it plummeting right toward where he’d be, but he couldn’t stop; the tiles would drop him into the spiked pit. They’d almost caught up with his steps as it was; he couldn’t even slow down or he’d fall. He tried to fire his jetpack, but it wasn’t responding. He was out of options. He dropped into a slide, a runner trying to get to home base before the ball. He looked up as the cube came crashing down on him.

 

 

            “KEITH!”

            Lance watched him throw his hands up just before the block crushed him, and the silence that followed was deafening, all the more because the traps – except for the pendulum – were still active. But Lance couldn’t hear them. He couldn’t hear anything at first, and then the first sound his ears registered again was his heartbeat thudding in his chest, and then Keith’s name being screamed, and it took him a bit to realize he was the one screaming it. There were hands on him, holding him back, and the world was starting to blur.

            The block started to rise again, and Lance squeezed his eyes closed and looked away because he didn’t want to see. He wanted to remember Keith alive and whole and not as some wet, red stain. He wanted to remember those rare times Keith smiled instead of smirked, the sound of his heartbeat, the warmth of holding each other. He didn’t want to see what reality was now.

But then someone was shaking him, someone was insisting he look. He didn’t want to, but he felt he had to. He turned his head back, but it took him a little longer to open his eyes.

            Keith was jumping down to the other side of the room, and he pulled the lever.

            Lance blinked tears away from his eyes as the floors either side of the long pit rumbled into life and started towards each other. They clanged shut and Keith grinned as the arrows stopped. The fire jets receded to half their distance and the way was clear and sure. A door opened in the wall next to the lever.

            Lance bolted for him, nearly falling in his hurry to cross the room. _I have to touch him, I have to know he’s real and he’s whole and he’s alive_. He caught himself, pushed himself up with his hands, and kept running until he threw himself into Keith’s arms and held on for dear life. He was still crying, but the tears were happy now as Keith hugged him back.

            “Sorry,” he said, and his voice vibrated through Lance’s chest, even with the armor they were both wearing. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

            Lance shoved him up against the wall, holding him at arms’ length. “WELL, YOU DID!” He yanked Keith back in for another hug. “You scared the ever-loving quiznak out of me, Keith.” He pulled away to ask, “How’d you survive? It… it crushed you.”

            “Look,” Keith pointed up. Now that they knew _where_ to look, the block was obvious, hanging in the ceiling. Its underside had two large divots in it, and the space between the divots made a perfect handlebar, like on any mass transit he’d ever seen. “The floor was falling away. All I needed was a way not to fall into the pit. And it gave me one. I just held on until it started to lift back up and jumped over here.” He grinned and Lance slugged him in the shoulder before hugging the stuffing out of him.

            And then Hunk was hugging them both and then Pidge was, too, and Allura came over and smiled in relief. “You scared _all_ of us with that stunt,” she told Keith.

            “Sorry. But it worked, didn’t it?”

            “Never again,” Lance pouted. Hunk and Pidge let go and Lance reluctantly did the same, so he could look Keith in the eyes and insist, “NEVER again.”

            “Of course not,” and Lance let him lie because he knew Keith would pull dumb, reckless stunts like this over and over again, and it was the most infuriating thing about caring about this moron as much as he did. So, Lance looked him in the eye so that he would know that he knew that it was a lie and that they would definitely be talking about this later. And Keith smirked, and Lance was so stupidly glad that he’d lived so that he’d have a chance to smack that smirk off his face later.

            “Let’s just go,” Hunk said. “I don’t really wanna be here anymore.”

            “Good idea,” Allura agreed. “After you,” since Hunk was closest to the door.

            He nodded and ducked through into the next room.

 

 

            Lights started to glow as Hunk entered, though he couldn’t see any sources for them. The first thing he noticed was two pedestals, about chest height, one surrounded by stala-…stalagmites. Yeah, he was almost sure that was it. They were tall and pointy, jutting up out of the ground and disrupting the tiles around the rightmost pedestal. The pedestal to the left was free and clear, easy to access. Other than that, they looked the same: one large button-y looking thing in the middle. No, no, wait: the right one, with the stalagmites, also had sharp shards of rock jutting out of it, surrounding the button. Trying to get to that one was already nearly impossible, but if he somehow could, he’d slice his hand open trying to press that button. _Why do I get the feeling that’s the one we need to press?_

            Other than that, the room was empty. He stepped carefully on the floor tiles, but they didn’t break away. It was nothing but an empty room with the two pedestals and no apparent exit. He turned to look back at the others who had filed in behind him. “What do you think we…?” He stopped.

            Each of them were standing, staring at a different section of wall.

 

            Her father was hugging her, and it was so good to be back in his arms again. He hadn’t died at all, but merely been sent into stasis like she and Coran had been. And Altea _wasn’t_ gone after all! When the Galra had come to destroy the system, they had used the same method of hiding their planet and its star that that other planet had used. That was so long ago by now though! It’d been ages since they’d been to that creepy temple. Now the universe was free from Zarkon! Voltron had triumphed and Altea and all its citizens had come out of hiding once more.

            “Father, I want to introduce you to someone very important and,” she felt her face heat, “very special to me.” She took Shiro’s hand and squeezed it as he stepped up next to her. “This is our new Black Paladin, Shiro. He was the leader of Team Voltron in our fight against Zarkon.”

            “A pleasure to meet you, sir,” Shiro said.

            “The pleasure is all mine,” her father replied with a warm smile. Allura looked between the two most important men in her life, filling with a happiness so huge she thought she’d burst with it.

 

            Lance tugged Keith into the front hall. “MAMA!” Oh, it was so good to be home again.

            Voltron had saved the day (and the universe), and now he could be home again, and he could introduce Keith to his family. But introductions would have to wait because his mother came barreling out of the kitchen to catch him up in a warm hug. He closed his eyes and savored it, trying not to cry because, dammit, he was a Defender of the Universe.

            She released him and ruffled his hair. “And who is this?” She grinned at their guest.

            Lance finger-combed his hair back into place. “Mama, this is Keith. Keith, this is my mom.”

            Keith held his hand out for a shake, but Mama hauled him in for the same hug-and-hair-ruffle treatment Lance had gotten, then looked him over. “Tsk. Too skinny! Too skinny by half! Don’t they feed heroes?! Well, we’ll fix that.”

 

            “Here we are! Dinner time for all my brave heroes!”

            Katie grinned. “Thanks, Mom.” She smiled over at Matt as their father came over to kiss Mom’s cheek.

            “Thank _you_ , my dear brave girl! You found our family and brought them all home again!”

            “Yeah, guess you’re good at more than video games,” Matt teased her. She stuck her tongue out at him.

            “It looks great, Mrs. Holt; thank you.” Shiro was always nothing but polite.

            “Oh man, this is awesome! Pass the rolls?” Hunk asked, already salivating over the delicious feast.

            Lance lobbed a roll at him and Keith elbowed Lance with a hissed, “Behave!”

            Katie laughed. Rover 2.0 beeped merrily, floating just behind her chair. It was great to have everyone over for a visit now that Earth and the whole universe was safe.

            “I don’t mean to be rude, but what is this?” Allura asked, holding up a fork.

            Coran was looking similarly flummoxed. “And why are there two of them?”

            The humans just laughed as Mom tried to explain, Hunk patting Coran’s shoulder consolingly on the lack of advanced flatware on this backwards little planet.

 

            Keith walked out of Red in his Altean flight suit rather than his armor. It’d just been a ‘training run’, which was code for ‘goofing off with Lance’, so he hadn’t bothered suiting up. What need was there now, really? Voltron had saved the universe. 

            But they all knew another threat could rise at any time. That’s why Shiro and Allura had established the Paladin Academy, to recruit and train future paladins as a peacekeeping force. Keith had been the first to sign up as an instructor. And though he spent his days running newbies through their paces, it was nice to slip away for ‘training’ with Lance, which usually consisted of egging each other on with challenges (which Keith usually won. Usually).

            He’d won today, no surprise, and Lance caught up with him now that he was out of Blue. “Next time,” Lance threatened.

            “We’ll see,” he responded airily, looping an arm around Lance’s waist. “For now, I was thinking we should hit the showers. Maybe go to bed early tonight?”

            Lance laughed. “Riiiiiight. I’m onto you.”

            “You don’t sound like you’re complaining.”

            “No, I’ll save that for tomorrow over breakfast.”

            Keith chuckled.

 

            Hunk looked between them all. He tried waving hands in front of their faces, but they were caught up in their little dreams. They were all talking to no one and nothing as if there were people there. He frowned. “Oh man, this is bad.”

            But they all looked and sounded _so happy_. Whatever they were all seeing (and he could make pretty good guesses, based on what they were saying), they were enjoying it. Hunk sighed. “Look, guys, I hate to do this, but we can’t stay. I know whatever you’re seeing is awesome, but we gotta keep going. Guys?” He tried knocking on Lance’s head, but nothing happened except that Lance wobbled a little and laughed at… whatever it was he was seeing.

            Hunk looked back to the two pedestals. They were lit up now with some sort of internal glow. The left one was a friendly yellow-green, like sunlight through green leaves. It felt warm and welcoming; he could almost hear it whispering promises of happiness to him. He even started to picture his family, happy and smiling back on a safe and free Earth, his grandma serving up all his favorite foods. He tore his gaze away and looked over at the right pedestal.

            It was a sickly jaundiced color. It made his stomach turn just looking at it. The shards of rock stabbing upwards from around the button almost seemed to hiss at him for his blood. He winced and turned away.

            It was painfully obvious which one he was supposed to choose, but also that doing so would be, well, _painful_. He looked between the two pedestals and sighed. He circled the right one, trying to figure out a way to make the stalagmites and the small shards go away. He walked around the room, feeling along the wall, listening to his friends enjoy their happy illusions. There was nothing.

            He stood in the center of the room and exhaled annoyance. Hurting his hand pressing the button was one thing, but he couldn’t even GET to it. He tried to pull out his bayard, to see about blasting the rocks, but it didn’t respond. “Aw, c’mon, Keith got to use HIS!”

            Without warning, the atmosphere in the room changed sharply. Hunk whipped his head around at the first scream.

 

            “NO!” She caught Shiro as he fell. Her knees buckled and she fell with him to the floor. She cradled him in her lap as he bled out, trying to reach his hand to her face. All around her, everyone she loved was in pain. Her father was dead, and this time it happened right in front of her eyes as he put himself between her and harm. Coran had tried to defend them both and was a bloody heap over in the corner. Smoke and fire and blood were all around her, and now she was losing Shiro, too.

            She looked up as Zarkon strode into the hall, looking quite pleased with himself. “Did you really think I was gone, Princess? Did you think you could get rid of me so easily?” He grinned down at her. “Voltron is mine, and with it, the universe.” Even over his sinister laugh, she could hear Shiro’s last gasping breath. His hand fell without ever having brushed her cheek one last time.

 

            The tide was red with blood, and Zarkon strode out onto Varadero Beach as chaos and slaughter went on around him. Lance tried to charge, but he was being held prisoner by Galra soldiers.

            He watched in horror as two soldiers brought out an unconscious Keith, and two more brought out his similarly passed-out mother. “I have a gift for you, Paladin,” Zarkon growled, “You may choose one of these two to live. But decide quickly; my generosity has its limits.”

            Lance looked between the two of them, unable to get the words out of his mouth. His mother. But Keith. But his mother. How could he…?

            “Too late.”

            Lance screamed as his mother was stabbed through the gut and left to bleed to death. His eyes whipped to Keith, but his headless corpse was also bleeding into the sand. Lance fought against his guards, but there was no escape, and nothing he could do.

 

            Suddenly Katie’s father rose from the table. “A toast!” Everyone raised their glasses with expectant smiles. “To the Galra Empire!”

            “What?!” She was aghast, but before she could do more than get out that single word, Matt turned and stabbed Mom in the throat. “NO! MATT, NO!”

            Her father’s and brother’s eyes glowed yellow and she realized: she hadn’t saved them after all. They’d been infected by corrupt Galra quintessence, turned into the perfect sleeper agents for taking out the Voltron paladins.

            Her father grabbed Coran’s hair and slammed him face first into the table. Katie jumped up and tried to intervene, but she didn’t have her bayard or even her armor. And then Matt was coming across the table for her…

 

            “I SAID WAKE UP!” And Keith felt a stinging slap across his face.

            The Academy was a dream. That’s all it ever had been, his way to escape from the reality of being a Galra prisoner. He was hanging from a set of chains in a dimly-lit room. The torturer glared at him with his yellow eyes. “There you are. Welcome back.”

            Keith spat in his face, and the torturer growled as he wiped the spittle away.

            “Still defiant. Well, we can fix that.” He turned and jutted his chin to the guard at the door. “Bring him in.” The guard saluted and left. Keith fought against his chains to try to get free while the door was still open but stopped when he saw who walked in.

            “Lance,” he breathed.

            He was in a Galra uniform. “Keith, you have to stop fighting. It’s so much easier when you just give in.” His expression was vacant.

            “What did you do to him?!” he demanded of the torturer.

            The Galra laughed. “We’ve helped him understand. There’s no escape from us. Better to join us than to die, isn’t it?”

            “And then we could be together again, like the old days,” the mindless-Lance said without any real joy. “Won’t that be nice?”

            Keith strained against his bonds again, then hung his head. “No. Please no.”

 

            Hunk looked back to the green, friendly pedestal. It talked to him the way Goldie did, but its voice was different: a sibilant but somehow discordant song. It promised to take the pain away, for him and all his friends. _Push the button_ , it said. _And it all goes away._ It beckoned him closer.

            He looked back to the other button. “Push the button,” he said to the empty chamber, “and it all goes away.” He could throw himself at the pedestal and probably be able to slam his hand down on the button. In addition to slicing his hand open, he’d probably wind up impaling himself on the stalagmites. _But maybe Allura can keep me alive long enough to get through this place and back to the Castle? But even if she can’t…_

            Lance was screaming again, and going hoarse after the bad fright he’d had in the last room.

            “This is gonna suck,” Hunk declared, and charged the right pedestal. He jumped and flung his hand out, waiting for sharp rock to puncture him in about a dozen different places.

            What he got was a jarring thud – which, to be fair, did hurt a little – as his knees hit solid ground, and the end of everyone’s screams. Also, a door opened in the wall on the other side of the pedestals.

            “What’s going on?” Allura asked.

            “Man, my throat is sore.”

            “Where…?” Pidge still sounded confused.

            And Keith had his bayard in his hand, breathing heavily.

            Hunk looked around himself: the stalagmites were still there, but he was kneeling through them? His hand had passed right through the pointy bits on the pedestal to land without harm on the button that had dispelled the illusions. “They’re all illusions? Oh, man, I wish I’d figured that out sooner.” He grunted as he got back up to his feet.

            Lance was trying to calm Keith down, so Hunk let him do that. He went over to explain to Allura and Pidge. “I’m sorry it took me so long. I was trying to figure out what the trick was.”

            “It’s okay, Hunk. You did the right thing, and that’s what’s important,” the princess assured him.

            “Anyone else get the feeling there’s gonna be three more of these?” Pidge asked.

            “Great,” Lance deadpanned. “I don’t suppose the next one is a beauty contest so I can just win it and we can move on?”

            Keith must’ve been feeling a little steadier because his bayard was gone and he shoved Lance towards the open door. “Well, go find out, why don’t you?”

            “I’m going, I’m going. No need to get pushy.”

            “Yeah, you can get your hands all over him later,” Pidge teased. It fell a little flat, lacking her usual sting.

            “If he behaves,” Lance declared as he walked through the door.

 

 

            “WHOA!” Lance came to a screeching halt just inside the next room. There was just enough room to stand comfortably and then a sharp drop off into a puddle of some sort of super-stinky liquid. The ledge went all the way around the circular room and there was a platform in the center with a large lever on it. The lever itself was huge and thick, like one of Hunk’s arms. It didn’t look like it was going to move easily. The room was well-lit, so everything was clearly visible. Hanging on the wall were five straps with clip-hooks on one end; one had a small loop hanging with it. There was, of course, no way out.

            “Okay, hug the wall,” Lance told them as he edged along. Some rocks and dirt dislodged themselves and fell as he scooted along; they hit the liquid with a sizzling hiss, even though it didn’t appear to be boiling. “Yeah, okay, that’s acid of some sort.”

            Pidge peered over the ledge as she came in. “Almost certainly.” She leaned back again. “And I do _not_ want to fall in. And my jetpack doesn’t seem to be working.”

            “Oh good, it’s not just mine then,” Keith commented.

            “We have to throw the switch somehow. And don’t you DARE, Keith,” Lance threatened him. But it turned out to be unnecessary; the door to the previous room slammed shut behind them once they were all in, so Keith couldn’t get a running start this time.

            “I hate this place so much,” Hunk groused.

            “Okay so I can’t get a running start,” Keith allowed. “But I bet I can still make it, even without the jetpack.”

            “NO. I just told you NOT TO,” Lance insisted. “Let’s look around, see if there’s a switch or a button or… something.”

            “You mean besides the giant lever in the middle?”

            “Yes, Keith, besides that.”

            “None of the other rooms have had anything but really obvious buttons and levers,” Pidge reminded him.

            “Just look around,” Allura insisted. “The one time we don’t check is going to be the time that it trips us up.”

            The walls revealed nothing of use or interest except the straps and loop. Even the wall where the door had been was as flat and featureless as if the door had never been there at all.

            “We have to figure out how to use what we’ve got to achieve our objective,” Allura said. She picked up one of the straps hanging on the wall nearest her. “It’s… stretchy a little? But I don’t think it’ll reach the lever.”

            Lance worked his way over to the strap and loop. “Huh. The loop is stretchy, too. Like a big ol’ rubber band.” He looked over at the switch. “Maybe we need to toss it onto the lever and then…”

            “And if you miss?” Pidge pointed out. “We only have the one.”

            “Besides, that’s too small to fit over the lever handle,” Hunk pointed out. “That thing is thick; it’ll never fit through there.”

            “LANCE,” Keith said, before Lance could even open his mouth.

            “I wasn’t going to say anything,” he lied. “This is serious time. We gotta figure this out.”

            “Okay, the hooks clip open and shut,” Pidge said, poking at the strap she’d picked up. “There’s five of the straps and five of us, so we’re all supposed to have a strap.” Everyone made sure to grab one if they didn’t already have one.

            “Hey, Keith, clip yours onto the loop thing,” Lance said.

            “We’re not playing around,” Keith told him.

            “No, no, I just want to see something.” He had already clipped his own strap to the loop. So, Keith edged over and clipped his on, too.

            “Now what?”

            “Pull.” Lance edged away, pulling on his strap. Keith backed in the opposite direction, pulling on his, too. The loop, of course, stretched. “MAN, this thing has a lot of stretch to it. Okay, ease down so we don’t go flying off.” They walked back towards each other to relax the tension. “You guys thinking what I’m thinking?”

            “Not usually, no,” Hunk said.

            “Okay, everyone scoot over to this far side here.” Lance positioned himself opposite the lever and the… wall that they’d come in through, since the door was gone. Everyone else joined him on one side or another. “Keith, hold onto your strap. Pidge, give me yours,” since she was the closest on his other side. She handed it over and he clipped it on to the loop, then offered the other end back to her. He repeated the process for Hunk and Allura.

            “Okay, now scoot along the wall. Try and get the straps to be like… like spokes of a wheel,” he said. “Hold on tight, but don’t let it pull you off the ledge.”

            One by one, they scooted back away from Lance. As they moved, the straps started pulling on the loop, stretching it more and more. “We need to get the loop over the handle!” Lance reminded them. “Keep going!”

            Allura and Hunk were clearly doing the most work, out on the opposite side of the ledge from Lance, and they had to pull more to get the loop over to the handle, since it was currently thrown towards the way they’d come in.

            “Who-o-oa!” Hunk scrambled as he nearly lost his footing. Splashes of dislodged ledge were quickly followed by the hiss of the corrosive acid below them.

            Allura increased her pull on her strap to try to take some of the pressure off Hunk so he could stabilize himself. Lance and Keith had to do the same on their respective ends because Pidge was straining hard.

            “Okay, now lower it over the handle…” Lance said, easing his strap down. “Allura, can you sort of steer it over there? You can see it better than I can.”

            “Got it,” she acknowledged.

            “Alright, on the count of three, everyone else let go.”

            “Lance, I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Hunk protested.

            “Are you sure that’s safe?” Keith added.

            “Okay, you do _not_ get to talk to me about safety,” Lance griped. “And it’ll be fine, I got this. Ready?”

            “Wait, wait, just to clarify: is it three and then go or go ON three?” Pidge asked.

            “Go ON three. Ready?” Everyone nodded. “Okay. One… Two… Wait for it…”

            “Lance,” Hunk grunted, still straining against the stretched-out loop.

            “THREE!” Everyone else let go as Lance summoned up as much strength as he had left to PULL.

            The loop snapped back mostly into its original, smaller shape, tightening around the lever, the released straps flying about wildly. The released tension from everyone else applied some extra force to the lever.

            Lance felt his legs go out from under him, but then there was a screech and the lever snapped back towards him. The door to the next room opened right behind him and he fell backwards into it as he let go of the strap before it could pull him over the side. He laid there, half in and half out of the room and laughed in relief.

            “That worked! I would have preferred the beauty contest though.”

            “Ugh, you’re telling me. I’m going to feel that tomorrow,” Pidge groused.

            “What’s the next room look like?” Hunk asked.

            “It’s… colorful,” Lance reported. Keith came over and offered his hand to pull Lance back up. They all peered in through the doorway.

            The room was divided into fifths, colored red, yellow, green, blue, and black. It wasn’t round, but it wasn’t a square either. It was hard to tell the shape of the room from here, but whatever it was, the colored sections met in a point in the center of the room.

            “So who’s going to be first through the door this time?” Pidge asked.

            No one moved.

            “Technically I was kind of already the first through the door?” Lance pointed out. “So I guess I might as well go all the way in.”

            “You were first into _this_ room,” Keith pointed out.

            “So? We all entered the first room together. It doesn’t _always_ matter who goes first, does it?”

            “It mattered for the second room,” Hunk pointed out. “I don’t ever want to go first again.”

            “Fine, _I’ll_ go first,” Pidge said. “But I’m not sure it matters. Like Lance pointed out, he was already sort of halfway into this room.”

            “Maybe it only cares about who steps foot in the room first?” Allura pointed out. “As in the literal footsteps?”

            “Guess we’ll find out.”

 

 

            Pidge walked into the center of the room and looked around. Well-lit with no obvious source of illumination. No other door, of course, just the colored sections meeting in a point. At regular intervals along the walls, down near the floor, there was a symbol: the same symbol in every section. “Hey, Allura, do you know what this is?”

            Allura walked in and looked where Pidge was pointing. “No; I’m sorry. It’s not Altean.”

            The rest filed in and stood with Pidge in the center of the room. The door to the acid room didn’t close behind them. “Huh,” Lance said, spinning around to look at the various colors. “So, are we just stuck here then?”

            “Somehow we have to activate the door to leave,” Pidge pointed out to him, “but that’s probably going to mean activating the traps, too.”

            “So we’re safe, but also trapped. Great,” Keith muttered.

            Hunk jerked his thumb back at the still-open door. “We can still leave.”

            “Yeah, but the door from that room back to the others is still shut,” Lance pointed out. “So we’re still trapped.”

            Allura sighed. “Well, we might as well get on with it.” She went to stand in the black section.

            “What are you doing?” Hunk asked.      

            “Isn’t it obvious?” Pidge answered him instead. She went to stand in the green section. “They’re color-coded to our lions. Shiro’s not with us, so Allura’s black. Go get in your section. Maybe something will happen when we’re all matched up.”

            “If nothing else, it gives us easily-defined areas of the room to search,” Allura pointed out. She started investigating the black part of the wall.

            The boys shrugged and went to stand in their appropriately-colored sections. As soon as they were all in, the door back to the previous room slammed shut. A white-blue dot of light burst into being in the very center part of the room. Allura stopped and turned to look at it along with the rest of them. The light spread in spokes outward from the center point along the borders of the colored sections, then up the walls, over the ceilings back to a central point just over the floor’s center. A line of light dropped down to connect the two and then the divisions …crystallized, somehow. Pidge tried to walk into Hunk’s section and hit a wall. She knocked on it, and it felt solid despite being barely visible.

            “Can you guys hear me?” Hunk asked.

            There was a chorus of agreement from everyone. “Okay, so we’re walled off from each other,” Pidge mused. “We need to figure out how to bring the walls down.”

            There was a whirring behind each of them. Pidge turned to look at the wall behind her. Symbols were coming out of the wall in three rows of three symbols each. The top row had a fourth symbol to the left of the first one, and to the right of the bottom row, there was a circular indent recessing into the wall rather than rising out of it, like a period at the end of a sentence. “Does everyone else have this?” she called back.

            “Yeah?” Hunk replied. “I mean, there’s some squiggly lines, and then this kinda roundy bit…”

            “Squiggle lines, roundy bit, different squiggle, triangle-ish…,” Lance was reading off the top row.

            “Same here,” Keith reported.

            “Yes, that’s what I have,” Allura agreed.

            There was a whirrCLANK! sound.

            “I don’t like that sound,” Hunk said.

            And then Pidge heard rustling at her feet. She looked down to see grass growing, and growing _fast_.

            “Whoa, whoa, whoa! Not cool!” Lance’s area was filling with water.

            Hunk was yelling as his cell began to shake.

            Allura coughed and covered her nose and mouth as a black mist started billowing in around her feet.

            “It’s getting a little warm in here…” Keith said.

            Vines were growing inside Pidge’s cell, spiraling down from the ceiling towards her. The tendrils split and thickened and reached for her. She backed towards the wall, but they shot out, wrapping around her middle and hauling her up into the air. She kicked and thrashed to no avail. She pulled out her bayard and sliced through them, but as soon as her feet hit the ground, they were picking her back up again. She had to keep slicing to keep the vines off her arms.

            But being up in the air had its advantages: she could see the layout of the room much better. _It’s a pentagon. It’s an equally divided pentagon, or it looks like it._ She realized the symbols on the bottom of the walls in each section were the same as one of the symbols that had come out of the wall.

            “Guys!” she called out. “Try hitting the center symbol, second row!”

            Everyone tried that, and there was a loud BUZZ! Every cell got worse: water was pouring into Lance’s cell faster, Keith’s was starting to glow with heat, Hunk’s was shaking harder, Allura’s was filling with that choking smoke, and Pidge winced as the vines squeezed her tighter. She was fighting to keep her hands free, but the vines were having little trouble wrapping about her legs.

            _Okay, so that’s not it. Let’s see. It’s the same symbol in each section, and on that center row. Each section is equal, so…_ _Wait!_ Leaving off the mysterious indent and the extra symbol on the first row, it was three rows of three, like… _like a key pad. So, the center symbol would be five. And if that’s a five…_

    * Break each section into halves.
    * One angle will be 90 degrees in each half. For a regular pentagon, the interior angles are 108 degrees, and those interior angles are bisected by the cell walls, so 54 degrees for those angles.
    * 180 – 90 – 54 = 36, so the third angle is 36 degrees.



            “Pidge?!”

            “SOMEONE DO **SOMETHING!** ”

            She tuned them out.

  * Assume length 5 units for wall, so 2.5 for each half of a section. This is side B.
  * C is the wall between cells. A is the imagined dividing line to cut each cell in half.



            It was getting hard to move her arms, but she tapped up her suit’s computer through her wrist command. _Fortunately for all of us, I **own** trig. _ “GUYS! Try 1 – 7 – 2 – 0 – 5!” she yelled.

            “What?”

            _Oh, right_. “The pad on the wall! It’s numbers! First row 0 – 1 – 2 – 3, next row 4 – 5 – 6, last row 7 – 8 – 9!” _I hope that’s the order._ She was guessing by the first row having four “digits” instead of the typical three that it was including the zero and going in order from there.

            Keith was hissing as he punched in his numbers, the hot wall burning through his gloves, but she watched him input the correct sequence. There was another loud BZZ! and he swore. “I don’t think that worked!” he yelled back at her.

            _I know I did the calculations right._ She pulled her bayard out and sliced through the vines until they dropped her. _I won’t have much time before these vines try to get at me again._ She ran to the wall.

            “The indent…” She tried it herself. The vines wrapped around her left arm, and around her middle. She punched what she thought was the 1, then the 7, then stuck her finger briefly in the indent, then 2, 0, and 5 just as a vine wrapped itself around her neck.

            The vines withered and died away. The grass began to recede. She yelled the instructions to the rest of them. Lance had to hold his breath and dive down to his number pad because the water was already so high in his cell. It took Hunk longest of all of them to make sure he was hitting the correct buttons with the localized earthquake going on.

            The cell walls disappeared as the dangers within each faded away, and everyone collapsed in their now safe section as the key pads disappeared. Allura’s key pad was replaced with the door to the next room.

            “What was that number?” Hunk asked.

            “The area of each section. They were equal sections, so they were all the same: 17.205.”

            “You mean you just math-ed us out of danger?” Lance asked.

            “And you said we’d never need to know this stuff,” Hunk teased him.

            “Still don’t so long as Pidge is around,” Lance pointed out smugly.

            “That means the last one is my test,” Allura said. She was mostly done coughing now.

            “You sure?”

            “Keith solved the first one, Hunk the second, Lance the third, and Pidge the fourth.” She rose to her feet again. “My turn.”

            “Besides, the doorway’s in her section.” Pidge pushed herself up as well. “We’re with you, Princess.”

            Allura smirked a little at her. “Weren’t you the one who pointed out that I am _not_ , in fact, a princess of yours?”

            Pidge shrugged. _Things change._ “It’s what Shiro would say if he were here.”

            “Good point,” Hunk said. He pushed himself back up and stumbled a little, catching himself against the wall. “Whoa, sorry. Aftershocks.”

            Lance stood and pulled Keith up with him. Keith looked around. “Well, let’s get this over with. After you, Princess.”

            She lifted her chin and walked through the doorway. Pidge wanted to be done with these stupid traps, but hopefully this would be the last one. And as much as she missed Shiro, she trusted Allura to get them through.

           

 

            Allura stepped through into a dark room. It wasn’t quite pitch black, but that might have been the light from the room behind her filtering in through the doorway. “Just a tick,” she suggested. “I can’t see anything in here. I need my eyes to adjust.” For all she knew, this room had a drop-off like the third room had had. She didn’t want to risk it.

            “Okay, this area just inside the door seems safe enough,” she said as her eyes adjusted enough. “Come in and let your eyes adjust, too.” She stepped forward enough to let them enter, but didn’t dare turn back to look at them, lest she lose her dark vision.

            “GYAH!”

            She almost turned around at Pidge’s surprised shout. “Are you okay?”

            “It… it blew some sort of… powder or sand or something into my eyes! Even behind the glasses! Ugh. I can’t see!”

            Allura held her hand out behind her and felt Pidge stumble into it. “Stop. I’m right here. Paladins?”

            There was another shriek – Lance, it sounded like to her – and another, most likely Keith. “Oh man,” Hunk whined. “We’re all gonna be blinded, aren’t we?”

            “I’m not,” Allura told them. She looked around the room, able to pick out more and more details. “It’s a maze.”

            What she neglected to mention was that the maze had no walls. She could see paths, but not always where they led to. More ominously, she could tell the difference, just faintly, between the paths and the inky oblivion that was on either side of them. “We’ll form a straight line,” she said, “join hands, and follow me. We may not be able to go quickly, but I’ll get us through.” _Better they not know_.

            Hunk finally stepped through the door. “Aah! That’s… ugh, I didn’t like that.” The door, of course, shut behind him.

            “My eyes feel all gritty.”

            “Do you think this stuff is hypoallergenic?”

            “Paladins, focus. Does everyone have hold of someone’s hand?” She turned to look back at them now that there was no light to blind her. She had hold of Pidge who had hold of Lance who had hold of Keith who had hold of Hunk. There was a chorus of agreement. “Good. Now stay in a straight line.”

            “We should put our hands on each other’s hips,” Lance suggested. “Like a conga line! Fun and functional!”

            She was about to politely tell Lance to knock it off when she realized, “Actually, that’s not a bad idea. Pidge, over here.”

            “Oh, man, I’ll have to bend so far over to get my hands on Pidge’s hips though,” Lance whined.

            “Use my shoulders then,” Pidge told him. “I don’t want your grubby hands on my hips anyway.”

            “And don’t get any ideas back there, Keith. We’re on a mission.”

            “I’m not… this isn’t…” Keith exhaled harshly.

            Hunk snickered. “Anyone else get the feeling Keith is blushing?”

            “Shut up.”

            “PALADINS.” _I miss you so much right now, Shiro_ , she thought, _because **you** could be dealing with them instead of me._

            “Okay, so here’s how a conga line works,” Lance began.

            “We’re not going to dance,” Keith said.

            “This is a dance on your planet?” Allura asked, before remembering that this was not the time for cultural discussion. “Well, for now we’re just going to walk. Single-file, slowly.” _Very_ _slowly, because if one of us goes over, we’re all done for._

The path stretched straight ahead of them in the dark, just wide enough for them to walk straight ahead. “Keep straight behind me,” she reminded them. Two steps in either direction and over they’d go. _Don’t think about that._

            She walked until the path hit a T-intersection. “Stop.” She looked left and then right. “We’ve got a turn here. We’re going to go left, one person at a time.”

            “Is there some reason you’re being so careful?” Pidge asked.

            “I’m just treating it like the invisible maze back on the Castle,” she answered. “It’s the same basic idea.”

            “Yeah, but is there some reason we can’t touch the walls?”

            “I don’t know and I don’t want to find out. I’d rather not discover too late that the walls deliver a bit more of a shock than the Castle’s do, or that they’re coated in some sort of poison, or… or touching them sets them on fire. Let’s just do this my way, okay?”

            “Okay.” But Pidge still sounded doubtful.

            “Pidge – and _only_ Pidge – let go. Okay, good. Now, I’m going to take one step,” she said as she did so, “now turn left, two steps, and I’ve stopped.” She turned to look back at her blinded paladins. “Lance, let go of Pidge. Now Pidge…”

            “Got it. Two steps, turn left…”

            “Wait, why two?” Lance asked.

            “To make up the extra distance,” Pidge reminded him.

            “I’ll tell you how many steps,” Allura said gently. “Don’t worry. Good job, Pidge. Just stay there for a second; I need to be able to watch the others. Oh, hold on, let me take a few more steps so we have room for everyone over here. Pidge, just… yes, stop. Okay, Lance, three steps forward.”

            One by one, she guided the paladins around the turn (including “your _other_ left, Keith,” which had her panicking a little and trying not to sound it). When they were all hooked up in their ‘conga line’ again, she resumed walking. “It’s a bit like a mother borving leading her brood,” she murmured to herself.

            The turns got shorter, and sometimes they had to turn around when Allura had inadvertently led them the wrong way – it was still dark as deep space in here, after all. The stress started getting to her. _How big is this room?_ There seemed to be no end to the maze. But she stayed focused on the task, willing herself not to get complacent.

            It was the dead ends that were the hardest part. Everyone had to turn around and Allura had to lead from the rear, hoping she could steer them all correctly with nothing but her commands. _Perhaps I should participate in the invisible maze challenge next time they do it._ Though she dearly hoped this wasn’t a situation they’d ever find themselves in again.

            She lost sense of time while she remained focused on space and exactly how little of it they had to walk safely. A headache was building behind her eyes. She couldn’t let them know how close they’d come to death on so many occasions. She couldn’t let them know how dangerous this really was. She had to bear all of this alone, and she had to do it _well_ , because they were all counting on her. Their lives depended on her, and the universe depended on them.

            “Stop,” she said after an eternity in the dark. “Pidge, let go; everyone stay still.” She walked forward and hesitantly stretched her hand out. It hit wall. She wanted to cry – another dead end, another turn around – but then the wall rumbled and a door opened for them. The room beyond had only a dim light glowing in it, and she could hear what sounded like water fountains. More importantly, it had a full floor of stone tiles with intricate designs carved into them. “I think we made it,” she said. “Grab hold, we’re going through.”

 

            The lights gradually strengthened, or maybe it just seemed that way to Keith. They washed their eyes in one fountain and drank from another after Pidge’s suit-based scanner registered it as safe. By the time he could see properly again, the room was well-lit despite there still being no obvious light source.

            Aside from the ornate tiles on the floor, there were mosaics on the walls in a rainbow of colors. Lions were a definite motif, but so were stars, planets, and moons. “Look at this,” Pidge said, pointing to a more geometric pattern on one wall. “This looks like some of the symbols we saw in the Blue Lion cave.”

            “Look at the _ceiling_ ,” Hunk said. When he did so, Keith saw what looked like a night sky. _Exactly_ like a night sky, as if there were no ceiling at all. Pidge threw her grapple out and it bounced off the “sky” and fell back down.

            “Hey, look, the Big Dipper!” Lance said. “And there’s the Little Dipper, so there’s Draco…”

            “Wait, wait.” Pidge peered up at the ceiling. “How the…?”

            “What are you talking about?” Allura asked them, peering up at the sky-ceiling.

            “These are _Earth_ constellations,” Keith told her.

            “We are still on whatever planet that was, right?” Hunk asked. “Or did we somehow get home?”

            They all looked at each other and then over to Allura. She shrugged. “As far as I know, we haven’t left the temple.”

            Keith looked away and then frowned. “What is that?”

            At the far end of the room was a large, ornately-carved slab that looked like it was made from the same ‘marble’ as the exterior of the building. There were a lot of symbols engraved on it, and two large candles sitting atop it that Keith could’ve sworn hadn’t been lit before his attention was drawn to it.

            Behind the slab was a row of plants, lush and green and seemingly well-tended despite the fact that there was no other discernible presence in the room and likely hadn’t been for some time. Near as he could tell, there weren’t even bugs or vermin. The place was pristine, untouched by anyone or anything, including entropy or possibly even time itself.

            “Wait a tick,” Allura said, peering at the slab. She came over and kneeled in front of one part of it to get a closer look. “Most of these symbols I don’t recognize, but this part here,” she looked back at them, “I think this is High Altean.”

            “High Altean?” Pidge asked. “Some sort of ceremonial language, I’m guessing?”

            “Close,” Allura told her, turning back to the slab. “It was the original ‘completed’ form of the Altean language millennia ago. Of course, linguistics scholars argue over its provenance and when it actually became ‘High Altean’ as we know it…”

            “Can you read it?” Keith asked her. Sometimes the similarities between Coran and Allura were more obvious.

            “Give me a few ticks,” she replied grumpily. “It’s been ages since I learned it, and it’s not something you need to use on an everyday basis.”

            “So, what are the other symbols then?” Hunk wondered. “Other languages?”

            “Well, if this temple _is_ dedicated to the Goddess of the entire Universe, that’d make sense,” Lance pointed out.

            “Apparently the Goddess of the Universe expects you to come in fives,” Keith commented, looking back towards the doorway they’d come through.

            “And be paladins of Voltron,” Pidge pointed out. “Or something very like it.”

            “Maybe this temple isn’t for the Goddess? Maybe someone actually _worships_ Voltron?” Hunk suggested.

            “Well, that’s understandable.” Lance was preening again.

            “Okay, if I’m reading this right,” Allura announced, “it says, ‘All those who are pure of heart are welcome to the Temple of the Goddess.’”

            Lance deflated a little. “So much for that idea.”

            “Hey, y’know, Voltron could _be_ the Goddess,” Hunk said. “I mean, think about it: none of the lions have manes, so they’d be female lions, right? So why do we think of Voltron as a guy in the first place, y’know?”

            “Hunk,” Allura said, “they’re robots. They’re sexless. As is Voltron, when you get down to it. And this clearly says ‘Goddess’.”

            “Okay, okay, just a thought.”

            “Does it say anything else?” Keith asked.

            She rose and shook her head. “Not that I can read.” She gestured to the other symbols. “But I’d guess it’s the same thing in all these other languages. Let’s look around a bit, see if we can find …something.”

            “What thing?” Lance asked.

            “We’ll know it when we see it,” Keith suggested and approached the slab to look around as everyone else examined the walls and the floor and… well, the ceiling was still showing the night sky of the Northern Hemisphere of Earth.

            “Oh look, little wooden lions!” Hunk giggled, picking one up to play with.

            “And don’t break anything, please,” Allura told them all.

            “Tell Keith that,” Pidge said, examining some gilt-edged bowls on a shelf along one wall.

            “I’m not going to break anything!” And then suddenly he felt a… almost a tugging sensation? _It feels like the same sort of energy I felt back on Earth. The one that was telling me to search._ He turned his head and noticed that the plants were in a sort of rough-hewn stone planter and one of the larger stones of the planter looked loose. He approached it and pulled and it came right out, revealing a scroll case. “Guys.”

            “What is that?” Lance asked, running up to see.

            “I don’t know exactly.” He pulled the case off.

            “Careful!” Pidge exclaimed. “Who knows how old that scroll is?”

            “Somehow, I get the feeling it’ll be okay.” He looked around, but there was nowhere except the top of the slab to lay it out on. So, he approached and unrolled the scroll, using the candlesticks to keep it open. “Great, more gibberish symbols.”

            “But some of them should be High Altean,” Allura declared. “Let me see.” She nudged Keith aside to get a better look. “There! Just give me some time to translate it.”

            “How’d you find it?” Pidge asked.

            “That stone in the planter looked loose. And it was like… like I just _knew_ I should look at it.”

            “Man, the Goddess of the Universe must like you!” Hunk said with a smile, setting the wooden lions back down on the shelf he’d found them on.

            “I dunno; we did have to go through all of those traps and puzzles just to _get_ here.”

            “Well, the slab said ‘the pure of heart’,” Pidge recalled. “They have to have some way to make sure not just anyone can get in.”

            “Did any of those traps really test the ‘purity’ of our hearts?” Lance asked. “More like our cleverness and teamwork and… and willingness to do stupid, reckless stunts.”

            Keith shot Lance a look. “You’re still mad at me, aren’t you?”

            “Ohhhh, you bet I am, Mullet.”

            “I’m. FINE.”

            “Yes, but that’s not what we’re talking about.” Lance folded his arms and affected a pout.

            “I’m not sure what you’re even saying there,” Keith said.

            “Okay,” Allura broke in, “these seem to be ritual instructions.” She looked up from the scroll. “Apparently, it’s expected that we’re here to pray for something, and that, if we do it correctly, the Goddess will answer our prayers.”

            “Ooh! Pray for the location of all their advanced technology!” Pidge suggested.

            “Pray for neverending food!” Hunk, of course.

            “Please, everyone knows you pray for more wishes,” Lance informed them all.

            “That’s _wish_ for more wishes,” Keith told him. “You’d pray for more… prayers, I guess.”

            “I can pray for more wishes if I want to!”

            “Paladins!” Allura cleared her throat and straightened up. “We need to agree on what we’re praying for here.”

            “I mean, I assume that by ‘pray’ we mean ‘a request for information’, right?” Pidge asked. “Because there’s no way this isn’t all incredibly advanced tech. Look at all of that we just went through! None of that was magic!”

            “How were some of those rooms lit then?” Keith asked. “How is _this_ room lit? We’ve only got two candles here, and the whole room is lit up.”

            “'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,’” she recited at him.

            “Yeah, man, Clarke’s got a point,” Hunk pointed out.

            “Whether this is magic or not,” Allura said, “this is a sacred place dedicated to an ancient Goddess. We should respect that.”

            Lance and Pidge seemed less than thrilled with the idea, but Keith shrugged. “Okay. So, what are we praying for?”

            “It should be something we all agree on. We should all pray for the same thing, together. After everything we went through to get here, with everything we had to do to help one another get this far, I think it only fitting that it’s a joint prayer.”

            “So, what do we all want?” Keith asked them all. He wasn’t even sure what he’d say to that himself.

            “Food?” Hunk suggested. “We do all want that, right?”

            “Seems a little… basic,” Allura hemmed.

            “We want cool weapons?” Lance suggested.

            “Peace?” Pidge put forth.

            Allura brightened. “Oooh, I like that one.”

            “Shiro,” Keith said quietly as the idea came to him. He looked around at the others. “We all want Shiro to get better, don’t we? We should pray for that. Because yeah, we want peace, and we want Zarkon destroyed and all that, but isn’t that what Voltron is for? Isn’t that what we’re supposed to be fighting for? If we could just come here and get it like that,” he snapped his fingers, “what would be the point?

            “If Shiro were here, he’d say we can achieve anything if we work together. But he’s not here. And isn’t that one of our biggest problems right now?” He let his gaze rest on Allura. “We need Shiro back.”

            She nodded at him. “I agree.”

            “Do you really think this ‘Goddess’ is going to just hand us whatever we ask for on a silver platter?” Pidge persisted. “Do you really believe in all of this …mumbo-jumbo?”

            “Yes.” Everyone stopped and stared and it took Keith a moment to realize the word ‘No’ had not come out of his mouth.

            “Really?” Lance asked.

            Keith didn’t know how to explain it at first. “Look, all I know is that something made me search for the Blue Lion back on Earth. Something helped me find those caves, and something helped me understand their stories. Something helped me know when Shiro would be coming back, and...” He clenched his fists. “Look, call it mumbo-jumbo if you want, but we can’t deny that our lions are more than just giant robots shaped like cats. We know them. We know their personalities, their minds, their hearts. How do they even _have_ those things?! They shouldn’t, but they do. Something gave them that.” He looked down at the scroll. “Maybe some _one_.

            “It… it doesn’t make a lot of sense, I know that.” He looked up again at them. “But it’s what I feel. And I trust it.”

            His fellow paladins and the princess shared a look, and then Lance stepped forward and put a hand on his shoulder. “Okay then. Allura, what do we have to do to pray for Shiro to get better?” He looked over at Keith and Keith smiled at him gratefully.

            She read them the instructions. “All who seek the Goddess’s favor must kneel before Her altar. Each must hold some of their consecrated element in their hands, save the officiator, who must put their hands on the altar of the Goddess. Each must connect with their element and with each other as they hold their prayer in their hearts. Each must then place their elemental offering on the altar. The Goddess will answer the prayers of the pure of heart.” She looked up. “That’s all it says.”

            Keith blinked. “What are our consecrated elements, exactly?”

            “I’m looking.” She moved the candlesticks aside so she could move the scroll again.

            “You hadn’t noticed?” Pidge asked. “Keith’s fire, Lance is water, Hunk’s earth, and I guess I’m… plants?” She shrugged. “It’s not exactly like on Earth, I suppose.”

            Lance’s brow furrowed. “So what’s Allura? Or, Shiro, if he were here.”

            “Air, I guess.”

            “How do you know all this?” Keith asked her.

            “Look at the sections of the pentagon room. Your section heated up; also, you solved the puzzle with the fire jets, and your lion literally shoots fire. Lance’s section was filling up with water and he shoots ice rays. Hunk’s section had earthquakes, my section had constricting vines, and Allura’s was trying to choke her with that nasty black mist stuff.”

            “So… how am I supposed to hold fire in my hand?” Keith asked.

            “Just hold one of the lit candles,” she suggested.

            “We can use these bowls,” Lance said, pointing at the ones Pidge had been looking at earlier. “Look, they’re even color-coded.” There were, in fact, four bowls, all the same white ‘marble’ type material, but each with a band of colored stone near the top: red, yellow, green, and blue. “But no black.”

            “I suppose I’ll be the officiator then,” Allura said. “I’m not quite sure how I’d offer up a bowl full of air, anyway.”

            “Should I just put the candle in the bowl?” Keith asked as Lance went to fill his bowl with water and Hunk to fill his with some of the earth from the planters.

            “I guess…?” Pidge shrugged.

            “No,” Allura said, looking up from the scroll. “Burnt offerings were an ancient tradition, after all.” She pointed at the wooden lions. “Put the lion figures in the bowl; use the candles to light one and put it with the others so they catch. It’s a symbolic offering, rather than literal, but it should still work. I can’t imagine what else they’d be here for anyway. And Pidge, use the leaves from the plants…”

            “Yeah, I got it. It looks like there are five different types of plants; I’ll take five leaves from each one. That should be good, right?”

            Allura smiled. “I hope so. We’ve got to please this Goddess after all.”

            “Yeah, maybe She’ll like us enough to let us leave without going back through all of that,” Lance commented as he walked up.

            “Hey, can we change what we’re praying for to that?” Hunk asked.

            “NO,” Keith and Allura said together.

            “Just a question. Yeesh.”

            “Did you find any more information?” Keith asked the princess as he gathered up the little wooden figures.

            “I found an illustration.” She held up the scroll to show it to them, and they all studied it for a moment and then nodded. “But that’s it.” She rolled the scroll back up and put it back in its case and left it on the altar. Keith brought his bowl of lion figures back over. “Okay, let’s do this.” He put his hand on the altar briefly, and then pulled a wooden lion out as the others came around to the front of the altar. He lit it in one of the candles and it caught easily. He set it back in the bowl and joined the others.

            Lance was to his right, Allura to his left, then Pidge, and then Hunk. They each dropped to one knee in front of the altar, except for the princess, who went down on both knees and put both hands on the altar in front of her, bowing her head, just as in the illustration.

            _Connect with my element_ , Keith thought. He closed his eyes and bowed his head over the bowl. He listened to the crackle of the fire, smelled the faintly-sweet smoke, and felt the heat of it rising up to his face. He wasn’t sure he was doing it right, but he focused on connecting with Red and what that felt like: that sense of certainty, of righteousness. _Please, Goddess of the Universe. I don’t know if You’re what’s been guiding me all this time, but if You are, help Shiro. Help **us** help Shiro. We don’t know what to do. He’s like a brother to me, and I can’t… I don’t want to lose the closest thing to family I’ve ever had. _

_They’re all my family. Lance and Hunk and Pidge and Allura and Coran. This is my family now, and I don’t want to lose a single one of them. Goddess, please, **please** be out there, and please hear us and please help us. You helped me find Shiro once. Help me bring him back again._

            He wasn’t sure how long he was supposed to pray, but something in him felt… warm. And it wasn’t the fire, or it wasn’t just the fire. He felt accepted, secure. It was like when they formed Voltron, but stronger and undiluted somehow. He felt it was the right moment, right now.

            He raised his head slowly and opened his eyes. He didn’t have to look to know the other paladins were doing the same. Allura hadn’t moved. In unison, the four pilots rose and placed their offerings on the altar. As one, they knelt back down.

            And then Allura was on her feet, almost like she’d been yanked up by the top of her head, but she was standing there, facing the altar and looking through the far wall. Her breathing was a little fast. She picked up the scroll case, then turned and walked back towards the door they’d come through. Keith looked at the others and got up to go after her.

            “OhpleaseOhpleaselet’snotgothroughthereagain,” Hunk was muttering as they followed the princess.

            “Hey, the constellations changed,” Pidge noticed. Keith didn’t even look up.

            Allura turned towards the wall opposite the door they’d come in and kept walking. Keith thought she was going to smack face-first into the wall when it split open for her. Hunk heaved a sigh of relief. She never paused, just went out the opening and they were back outside again, and it was still sunny but the breeze had stopped and the ground was muddy.

            “It must’ve rained while we were in there,” Lance said, eyeing the mud distastefully.

            “It didn’t look like it was gonna rain when we went in,” Hunk mused.

            “Don’t lose sight of her,” Keith warned them. She was walking quickly, not quite jogging. She wasn’t talking though, and she still had that look of someone possessed.

            “Guys, I’m going to go get my lion,” Pidge said. “Just… just in case.”

            “Yeah, good idea,” Keith agreed. “We’ll keep track of the princess.” Pidge nodded and ran off.

            Allura walked across grass that was almost too-bright a green to be believed, but then it was still more normal than the pink and purple leaves on the trees. _I hope this is You_ , he thought to the Goddess of the Universe, _or Who- or Whatever was helping me back on Earth._ Because if it wasn’t, and they somehow managed to get Shiro back, Keith didn’t want to have to tell him that the love of his life had been possessed by some indescribable force and walked off a cliff to her death or something like that. _I really, **really** hope this is You, Goddess._

 

 

            Allura kept walking. She didn’t know how far she’d walked. It didn’t matter. It was like she could see the way to what they needed, even though she wasn’t conscious of what it was or even where. She didn’t know where she was going, only that she was on the right path. She’d never been more sure of anything in her life, and she knew it was because she was being guided.

            She wondered if this was what it was like for the paladins in their lions: this feeling of not being alone, of support. If that were true, she envied them this. It was little wonder they spent so much time with their lions then. She’d chalked it up to dedication, but it was so much more than that.

            This was a feeling not just of guidance, but of warmth and acceptance. She felt like she’d been crying for hours and her father had come in to hug all her tears away. Feeling like this, Allura felt confident they _could_ do anything, together. That it would be difficult, but that anything worth having in this universe was worth fighting for. And they would be victorious.

            _I will fight for you, Shiro. I will fight for Father’s dream. I will fight for all of us. I will fight to end Zarkon’s reign and restore peace to the universe. I will fight alongside the paladins and we will win._

            But right now, she had to find It. Whatever it was, it was the answer. It was Her answer to their prayers, and it was closer with every step. The paladins were following her; even if she couldn’t hear them, she could feel them. She knew they were behind her every step of the way.

            The Goddess was guiding her, and Allura began to see images in her mind: something white, gleaming, and pure. Surrounded by darkness, but not evil. Just an absence of light. Buried. It had to be unearthed. It was close.

            She stopped. “Here,” she said aloud. “It’s here. Just beneath me. This is it.”

            She closed her eyes.

 

 

            “She just collapsed,” Lance told Coran. “And we ran over, but she seemed okay. It was like she fell asleep or something. And we dug where she told us to, and we found… this.”

            He gestured to the large chunk of gleaming white metal, like highly polished silver. Coran knew it was no ordinary metal without Lance telling him, “Pidge’s scanners say it doesn’t correspond to any known element. Hunk called it Mithril, and then he and Pidge got into a fight over whether it should be that or Orihalcon, and…”

            “I believe I know what it is,” Coran told him. “But first things first.” He tore his eyes away from it to regard the paladins – all of them except Shiro (of course), and Hunk, who had carried the unconscious Allura off to her room. “What took you all so long?”

            They glanced between themselves. “What do you mean?” Pidge asked. “It’s a long flight from there, even in a lion. You know that.”

            Coran frowned. “You lot have been gone for three entire sleep cycles!”

 

**12 Sleep Cycles Ago**

            “WHAT?!”

            “Yes!” he confirmed.

            “How is that possible?” Keith asked.

            “It was only one day!” Lance insisted.

            “That explains the change in weather when we came back out,” Pidge murmured.

            “I get how it’d be easy to lose track of time in that place, but… we should be exhausted,” Keith pointed out.

            “The Goddess of the Universe sustained you through Her trials,” Coran explained. “Because you are truly Her chosen ones.”

            “You really believe in this, don’t you?” Pidge asked him.

            Coran shrugged. “If I didn’t before, it’s hard not to now, isn’t it? You completed a sacred prayer ritual and She answered your prayers!”

            “I don’t see how,” Lance said. “It’s just a lump of some really shiny metal.”

            “I can’t be one hundred percent certain, but I believe this is luxidium, a sacred metal so apocryphal as to be considered fictional by most Alteans I know, er, knew. Even Grandfather didn’t know much about it. I’ll do some research, dig up everything I can find on it, but if it’s what I think it is, then it _is_ the answer to our problems. At least, our Shiro-related ones.”

 

**11 Sleep Cycles Ago**

            Allura sat in her bed, eating carefully from her bowl as she read over the scroll. Away from its temple, the scroll had changed to be entirely in High Altean and had much more information. She might’ve marveled at this, but nothing about the scroll, the temple, or that planet surprised her now.

            The feeling of guidance she’d had was gone. She missed it, but she didn’t have time to pout. She could remember everything (from when she was conscious anyway) and she felt like she’d been given a task. Having the Goddess’s hand on her would’ve been wonderful, but Allura took it as a sign that it was unnecessary, that the Goddess trusted her to be able to see it through on her own.

            It’d taken her the better part of a day to recover from being a temporary vessel for the Goddess of the Universe, and she had a lot of work to do. So, she ate and drank while she read, her long-ago lessons in the ancient language coming back to her. High Altean was flowing easier now, easier than it ever had before, she thought. _If I’d known back then how badly I’d need this now, I wouldn’t have given my tutor so much trouble._

 

            It’d taken Pidge a bit to get over her squeamishness. If it had just detached like any normal prosthetic, it wouldn’t have bugged her so much. At first, it was hard to look at the arm without remembering how it had been removed: the screaming and the blood. The Castle was usually gleaming and pure and for some reason she was surprised that Shiro’s blood hadn’t permanently stained it. Logically, that was ridiculous, but it somehow would’ve felt… not right, but it wouldn’t have surprised her. To have it cleaned up and gone seemed strange. It shouldn’t have been, but it was.

            But it was for the best. Better not to have the reminder, especially for when Shiro woke up. And nothing was going to be helped by avoiding things. So, Pidge had swallowed down her distaste and dug into the arm, with help from Hunk. He hadn’t liked it much better at first, either, but they both needed to do this, for different reasons.

            Hunk was in the process of designing Shiro’s new arm, so he was using the old one as a template. Pidge, of course, was going through the arm’s software for her own pet project. It was one thing to cart about a random Galra sentry arm, but no one was going to want to carry _this_ on missions. She was going to make a simple tool based on the arm to let them access Galra information, and hopefully without that “Fugitive prisoner 117-9875” problem. Stripping that metadata out was the worst, because it ran through everything and it kept cropping up. Easy to deal with, but constant and annoying.

            She worked on it as much as her other duties allowed. She wanted something good to come of this. She wanted to be able to hold up her work (metaphorically speaking, as she was hoping to upload it as a program into their suits for easy access and portability) and say, “At least we have a master key into Galra systems.” It’d go a long way to saving the universe and, hopefully, also her family. Both of her families.

 

 

            Keith was standing there, watching Shiro. _Did you do that for me when I was in one of those pods?_ Lance wondered. He didn’t say anything, at least, not right away. He walked up to stand next to Keith.

            Shiro was Lance’s hero, and had been for a long time. He was their leader. He was always looking out for them. He was sort of like the Space Dad in this weird little family they’d made out here. Lance missed him and wanted him back, but not as badly as Keith did.     

So, it wasn’t really a surprise to find him here, brooding over his mentor. Lance was learning to be patient. He’d figured out (with some help from Shiro) that so long as he was there for Keith, he’d come around. Eventually.

            Lance stood next to Keith and waited. As much as he wanted to talk, to ask questions, to press Keith to talk to him, he kept quiet. _You could hurry up though_ , he thought. He wanted to be away from the cryo-pods; they still kind of creeped him out.

            Finally, voice little more than a rough whisper, Keith said, “He was the only one who believed in me. Everyone else thought I was too reckless, too undisciplined.” He dropped his gaze to the floor as his voice got stronger. “I guess they were right, in the end; when the Kerberos mission just… vanished, and they said it was ‘pilot error’…”

            Lance snorted. “It’s like they didn’t even know who they were talking about! ‘Pilot error.’”

            “Yeah,” he agreed, sounding hollow. “But without Shiro, I couldn’t hack it. I couldn’t put up with the lies and the yelling and all of that.”

            “That was the Garrison’s problem, not yours. You’re a great pilot, Keith.” He put a hand on his shoulder. “Almost as good as I am,” he teased lightly.

            Keith gave him a “really?” look, and Lance hoped for a moment that he’d broken him out of his somber mood. But then Keith looked back to Shiro. Lance looked, too, and shivered. So still. _Like looking at his corpse._ Knowing that, eventually, they’d figure all this out and wake him up again didn’t really help right now.

            Keith had gone all quiet again, but with his hand on his shoulder, Lance could feel the tension in him. “Shiro would understand, y’know. About the arm. You did what you had to do.”

            “I know. But it doesn’t help.” He fell silent again, and Lance scrambled to come up with something – anything – to say. He probably shouldn’t talk; he should follow Shiro’s advice and let Keith talk in his own time, but he felt like he just _had_ to say _something_. But then Keith beat him to it. “I keep hearing him scream. I keep seeing the blood, and I… I feel like some sort of monster. Sometimes I don’t even feel human.”

            Lance pulled Keith into a hug. “Stop that. You’re Keith and you’re a paladin of Voltron and you’re my boyfriend, which makes you the luckiest person in the entire universe, human or not.” He felt him latch on tightly. “And none of that makes you a monster.”

            “You’re too good for me,” Keith murmured.

            “Yeah, well, like I said, you’re super-lucky.” Lance gave Keith a quick kiss on the cheek.

            “You’re not _that_ good.”

            _There it is_. Lance was getting better at reading Keith. _He’s getting back to himself a bit now_. “Oh, I’m not, am I? Sounds like someone needs a reminder of exactly how awesome I am!” He meant it as a sparring challenge. He was getting better at actually giving Keith a run for his money in hand-to-hand fights. Slowly, but he _was_ improving.

            But instead of a fight, Keith raised his head and looked Lance in his eyes and whispered, “Maybe I _do_ ,” and this was a whole different type of challenge being issued. The slight spark in his eyes, the little quirk of his lips, the almost-possessive hold he still had on Lance’s jacket.

            Lance grinned through the blooming heat in his face and tugged gently on a lock of Keith’s hair. “Bring it on, Mullet.” He remembered they were in the infirmary, in front of an unresponsive Shiro. “But, uh… not here.”

            “Ugh, no.” Keith pulled away just enough to grab Lance’s hand and tug him towards the door. “C’mon.”

           

 

            “It _is_ luxidium,” Coran informed them. They were all on the bridge, gathered around the strange lump of metal. “More precisely, it seems to match the known properties of luxidium and I don’t know what else to call it.”

            “And luxidium is…?” Pidge prompted.

            “So impatient,” Coran sniffed. “Well, luxidium is consistently referred to as a ‘shiny, white metal’, which this clearly is. It’s also lighter than you’d expect for its size, as you’ve probably noticed?”

            “Yeah,” Hunk agreed. “Made me wonder if it was really dense enough to be metal.”

            “It has all the other metallic properties,” Coran told him. “And it’s very tough; nigh-indestructible. Also, it’s got the highest magic conductivity of any known substance.”

            Pidge groaned. “Magic again?”

            “But that’s what makes it so good for us!” Coran declared. “You see, I believe that I can make a filter with this that should separate the corrupted quintessence from Shiro’s blood! Wouldn’t take much of it, actually, and we could use the rest to make him a new arm!”

            “Um… how?” Hunk asked. “I mean, yeah, I was planning on using this stuff to make Shiro’s arm, but you _just_ _said_ it’s ‘nigh-indestructible’. Which means it might be a bit difficult to work with.”

            “Yes, there is that rather large downside.”

            “I might have found the answer to that particular problem,” Allura put in. “In the temple scroll, there’s mention of a ritual for the smithing and shaping of what it refers to as ‘the Goddess Element.’ But it can only be done within the Temple itself.”

            “Ugh, we have to go through all of that all over again?” Lance protested.

            “Possibly, but at least we know all the tricks now.”

            “Basically, we have to get the Goddess of the Universe’s help to get this stuff to do what we want?” Keith asked.

            “Apparently so.” She shrugged.

            Pidge was inspecting the luxidium up close. “You’re sure that a filter made of this stuff will work?”

            “As sure as I can be,” Coran told her with a wide smile, before adding, “Which is to say ‘not very sure at all, but what else can we do?’” He shrugged. “You all prayed for a way to help Shiro, and the Goddess gave you this. We’ll try it.”

            “How will we even know it worked? Wake him up and see if he tries to kill anyone?”

            “Hn, good point. I’ll have to make a sensor out of the luxidium, too. Still, those are small parts,” Coran pointed out. “You dug up quite a bit.”

            “That’s the thing,” Hunk said, “we didn’t really have to do much more than get Pidge’s lion to dig straight down and it was just… there. Like it was waiting for us.”

            “The Goddess wanted us to have it,” Allura told them.

            “We have to go back to the Temple,” Keith broke in as Pidge groaned over all the talk of magic and deities. “So let’s just go.” He started back towards the doors.

            “Just a moment.” He stopped to look back at Allura as she spoke up. “We should take the Castle down. It’ll be much more convenient, and once we’re on the planet, we should be protected by its invisibility.”

            The paladins shared a look. Coran didn’t like it any better than they did, but he also knew the princess was right. “It’s risky,” Keith observed.

            “So is saving the universe,” the princess replied smoothly.

            Another long moment. “Fine,” Keith said. “We’ll get in our lions, just in case we run into trouble.”

            “I’ll try to pick out a good path for us,” Coran said. “We don’t know the patrol schedules in this sector or anything like that. Don’t even know if there _are_ patrol schedules. But I’ll find us the most cover for the longest time possible, anyway.”

            “I’ll get back to work on adapting the cloaking device to the Castle,” Pidge said, “at least until it’s time to get to the lions. I doubt I’ll have anything useful in time, but you never know.”

            “I’ll help,” Hunk offered.

            “Thanks.”

            Coran turned and set to figuring out the best course as the paladins found things to do elsewhere. Allura came up next to him. “Do you believe this will work?”

            “It has to,” he said.

            “Yes, I suppose it does.” She watched his screen for a long moment. “Thank you for everything you do, Coran. I’d be lost without you.”

            “You’d be fine,” he told her. “But thank you. Too much to hope you’ll start listening to me when I suggest things you don’t want to do?”

            She nodded, a hint of a smile coming to her lips. “Way, way too much.”

            “Ah well.”

            She patted his shoulder and left him to his work. He only had to find a way to sneak through a heavily-trafficked enemy sector, that’s all. But he spared a second to think back to his grandfather and all his stories.

            When he was younger, he’d thought it a shame that a brilliant engineer/architect/designer should believe in such fiddle-faddle. Then he’d written it off as harmless nonsense: it didn’t interfere with Grandfather’s work, so why begrudge the old man some eccentricities? As he’d aged, he’d come to understand more and more that science wasn’t the only power in the universe. His grandfather seemed more and more brilliant for being able to meld well-ordered science with such a chaotic notion as “magic”.

            Let the Earthlings roll their eyes at it. It was hard to argue with results. Voltron and the Castle of Lions were as great as they were because of the hearts and minds of those who had shaped them, and that was a magic all its own, as far as Coran was concerned. He patted the console like it was a faithful pet, and whispered a thank you to it for its hard work. It almost felt like it purred back at him in response. _Probably just the humming of the crystals and machinery._ But he smiled.

 

 

**9 Sleep Cycles Ago**

 

            Of course, it all went wrong. Pidge and Hunk couldn’t get a cloaking device for the Castle working in time, but Allura hadn’t really expected they would. Coran planned the best possible course, she had no doubt. The paladins were in their lions, ready to launch at the first sign of trouble, as planned.

            And trouble, of course, found them almost as soon as the Castle left cover. They ran straight into a mess of Galra ships and the planet was suddenly invisible to them. “Probably to protect itself,” Pidge theorized, and Allura conceded the point: if they went in and suddenly disappeared, it might give the Galra a place to start searching. The planet was invisible, not intangible. It could be found if you knew where to look.

            The lions launched and the Castle provided covering fire. It didn’t take long for Allura to realize it wasn’t going to be enough, especially when backup arrived in the form of a large command ship and its own fleet. It was clear that the lions alone weren’t going to be enough.

            No one ever said saving the universe would be easy.

            Her earrings flashed constantly with the paladins’ voices over the comms.

            “PIDGE, WATCH YOUR SIX!”

            “Whoa, whoa, whoa!”

            “Holy freaking quiznak what the…?!”

            “Got it!”

            “Great. Three down, about five billion to go.”

            “It’s not five billion. Maybe a thousand, tops.”

            “LOTS, okay?! THERE’S LOTS TO GO.”

            The Castle shuddered.

            “Lance, we’re gonna take out that cannon. Pidge, Hunk, we’ll need some cover.”

            “Trying!”

            _Come **on**. Why does this take so long?!_ Every second they were out there was another chance for something to go from bad to worse. _I will never give the paladins a hard time about how long it takes them to get to their lions again._

Because that’s where she was headed now, as fast as the speeder could take her. _It might’ve taken less time for me to run to the hangar and climb in the old-fashioned way._ Which she knew wasn’t true, but she was frustrated by her inability to help. More than that, she was frightened, which was why she was here in the first place. _We can’t lose. Not here. Not now._

The Black Lion accepted the speeder. _So far, so good._ She was in the seat, sliding forward into the command module in the head. The controls lit up, but her hand hovered over the control sticks hesitantly. And then there was another shout over the comms, and she grabbed hold. “I’m coming,” she whispered, and then the lion launched.

            It was even more chaotic out here than it had looked from inside. She was shooting down Galra fighters before Keith even had the chance to demand, “Allura, what the hell are you doing out here?!”

            “You can’t do this all on your own! Focus on the ion cannon; I’ll help thin the swarm!”

            It’d been ten thousand years since she’d last had to truly pilot a craft. She’d enjoyed her piloting lessons a lot more than her study of High Altean, but it was still a skill that had fallen by the wayside. But the lion’s control screens were helpful; unlike the paladins, she could read and understand them just fine. And that was good, because she wasn’t getting any help from the lion itself. At least, not that she was aware of.

            The way they all spoke, she’d expected something… more. Something like when the Goddess had been guiding her. This was a ship, grand and impressive (and lion-shaped) but still nothing more than a ship. And though it handled beautifully and her memories of lessons past came gliding back quickly as she darted about and took out fighter after fighter, it was still a little disappointing.

            _But this is Shiro’s lion, not mine._ Her blood was pumping, her heart racing, her mind sharp and focused as she dove and twisted and blasted her way through enemies. It was thrilling. But this was Shiro’s job, not hers. _Enjoy it while you can_ , she thought as she sliced open a destroyer with the jaw blades. It exploded in her wake as she sped off to her next target.

            “We got trouble, guys,” Pidge said. “Two o’clock.” Allura had no idea what that meant, but a warning flashed: Incoming. Another fleet dropped out of hyperspeed right in front of them.

            “This is insane!” Lance whined. “We just took out one ion cannon, and now we gotta deal with another?”

            “This is where we need Voltron,” Pidge replied.

            “Yeah, ripping ion cannons off and just tossing them away was _so_ much easier,” Hunk agreed.

            “Well, let’s form Voltron then!” Allura told them.

            Silence.

            Hunk was trying to be diplomatic. “No offense, Princess, but…”

            “You’re not Shiro.” Trust Keith to cut to the heart of the matter.

            “No, I’m not. But we can’t save the universe if we don’t first save ourselves. We all agree on that, do we not?” There was a chorus of agreement. “Well, let’s focus on that, on our shared commitment.”

            “Yeah, I do share the commitment of staying alive,” Hunk said.

            She closed her eyes and tried to focus on forming Voltron in her mind. But after a few moments of nothing but the occasional hit rocking her lion, she opened her eyes again. “Paladins?”

            “It just… feels wrong.” Lance sounded apologetic.

            “ION CANNON!” Keith yelled, and she watched the Red and Blue lions swoop off into the fray again. She sighed and resumed targeting the destroyers that had come in as part of the new fleet. There were still plenty of small fry fighters, buzzing around and being annoying, too.

            “Pidge, the destroyers are going to be the main threat to Keith and Lance while they’re dealing with that cannon. We’ll take care of those. Hunk, clear out fighters.” There was a blast from the Castle, aiming for the already de-cannoned command ship. _Thank you, Coran._

            The Green and Yellow lions moved to obey her, so at least there wasn’t a question of her authority. _But we have to form Voltron. We need to end this fight quickly and get down to the planet._

            “We need cover over here!” Keith yelled.

            “I can’t do damage to this cannon if I’m spending all my time not dying!” Lance affirmed.

            “Paladins, we _must_ form Voltron!”

            “You think we don’t know that?!” Keith demanded hotly.

            “We’re trying to keep from getting killed out here!” Pidge reminded her.

            She dropped the strident tone, cleared her throat, and did something she wasn’t used to doing. “I know you all miss Shiro. I do, too. I miss him every day, and I hate that he’s in that blasted cryo-pod. I can never forget… his arm, his blood, his sc-scream.” She swallowed hard. “That was my order. That was my decision. And it hurts me. But now we have to do whatever we can to make it right, so that the pain I caused him won’t be in vain.

            “I know that this is his place, and not mine. The Black Lion is Shiro’s. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t necessary.” Another blast rocked the lion; she ignored it. “But think about what he would want if he _were_ here. Think about what we must do for his sake, if not our own.”

 

            Hunk nodded. _We gotta do this for Shiro. Plus, y’know, I don’t really want to get blasted to space dust._ He thought back to the maze they’d navigated in the temple. _Allura got us through that; she’ll get us through this._

_The pretty lady’s right_ , Lance thought. _If we can’t trust her, then what are we even doing out here?_ Blue purred agreement in his mind, and Lance patted one of the control sticks with a smile. _So let’s do this thing!_

            Pidge re-settled herself in her seat. _Shiro would want us to fight together, not against each other. He’d want us to listen to Allura, to help her, even if he weren’t so gaga over her. Without her and the lions, we wouldn’t even be here. Without her, we wouldn’t have the lions! But she needs us, too. We all need each other. That’s what a team is._

 

            Keith heard Allura’s words over and over in his head. _She blames herself._ _I was the one to cut off his arm, but… I did it at her order. I… **we** did it to save him, and to save all of us. How is this any different? If anything, this is easier. She’s not replacing Shiro; she’s **not**. This is just to get us through, so we can get him back. _ He shot a look over at the Blue Lion; flashes of the nightmare he had in the temple returned to him. _We’re getting overwhelmed. I won’t let Lance get killed or captured. I won’t let Shiro down. I won’t let **anything** happen to this team!_

 

            Allura reached for the paladins in her mind, tried to feel for them with her heart. She felt fear, confidence, awareness, and rage. _So close._ She wondered if this was how it felt for Shiro, where she couldn’t tell if these were her own feelings or the others’. She wondered if it was really so easy for him to open himself to them.

            She was used to hiding her feelings. She was used to hiding information, too. They didn’t need to know everything. They didn’t need to know her fears, certainly. That was what a leader did, wasn’t it? But now she had to open herself to the paladins. She had to repay their trust with her own.

            A steadiness washed over her. It was warm, it was strong, and she could almost feel his heartbeat. It said, _We can do this. All of us. Together._

“Shoulder cannon!” she ordered, and even though she’d never been in Voltron before now, there was no hesitation. She knew exactly what to do and how to do it, the information fed into her from… the lion? The other paladins? It wasn’t exactly telepathy, and not precisely empathy. It was unique, similar to the feeling of being guided by the Goddess, but so, so different. _I’m not alone_.

            Hunk’s bayard provided the shoulder cannon and its multi-target reticles. “FIRE!”

            The Castle was turning its fire on the other command ship as the first wave of fighters went down under Voltron’s barrage. The first command ship that had shown up was already fleeing the area, but this one seemed determined to live up to the Galra tenet of Victory or Death. _You will **not** win_ , she thought grimly.

            The shoulder cannon was replaced with Red’s sword, and Voltron came around through the debris to ram the blade into the ship’s bow nearly to the hilt. Firing its jets, they flew parallel to the ship, dragging the sword halfway through it. A quick retreat and they were able to see their handiwork as explosions broke out along the command ship. A quick blast from Green hit the ion cannon’s base and added fuel to the fire. The resulting blast took out a wave of fighters.

            “Coran, do you still have the readings on the planet’s location?”

            “Yes, Princess. It’s still invisible, but we know where it was. Presumably it hasn’t moved all that much in the last few days.”

            “Good. Start landing procedures. We’ll finish cleaning up out here and meet you on the surface.” The shoulder cannon was reforming to deal with stragglers. The Castle’s engines began to power up.

            It felt good to be connected to her team like this. It felt _right_ , and she began to understand how badly she’d misjudged both them and how best to lead them. _No more secrets_ , she promised herself. _We’re a team._

           

 

            “Okay, so how do we do this?”

            They were back in the temple, though to look around, one might be forgiven for thinking it was somewhere else entirely. When they’d opened the doors again, the first trap was gone, and they were in what looked more like a cathedral than either the trap-filled nightmare they’d endured the first time or the Greco-Roman architecture it still looked like from the outside. In fact, Hunk was pretty sure the outside didn’t correlate to the inside at all. The giant stained-glass window of Vs in the five Voltron colors kind of pointed to that.

            Sunlight filtered in through the gemstone roof, dappling the mosaic tile floors and the lavishly-decorated altar. There were well-tended plants, stacks of balanced stones, and the trickle of ornate water fountains. Lit sconces helped illuminate the wall frescoes and tapestries, and only occasional wisps of smoke floated up towards the high ceilings. It was gorgeous, and Hunk wished they could’ve just _started_ here, but nooooooooo, someone had to be picky and potentially lethal first.

            They were gathered around the altar as Allura consulted her scroll. This altar was the same size and similar shape as the stone slab, but it was metal now – a lot of gold, but also platinum and titanium – and engraved with lions and, of course, more writing. All the writing on it was apparently High Altean, not the various scattered languages of the universe. Disturbingly, Allura told them the writing was welcoming them back. _Look, I just want something here to stay the same, okay? So that I know what to expect?_ But it wasn’t actively shifting around them at the moment, so he focused on what they here to do.

            They had the luxidium centered on the altar, as Allura had instructed. “Luxidium is forged in the heart and mind,” she was reading out.

            “So, we have to think about what forms we want it to take?” Hunk asked. “Like, do I have to imagine every individual piece, or can I just picture An Arm?”

            “It doesn’t specify,” she said.

            “Maybe think about the major pieces and how they fit together?” Pidge suggested. “Hopefully ‘the Goddess’ can extrapolate from there. Plus we have to get a sensor and a filter out of this, too.”

            “I can focus on those well enough,” Coran put in. He’d been enjoying himself in the temple, but then he hadn’t been here for all the attempted murder.

            “All of us will need to contribute our energy to the endeavor,” Allura said. “According to this, we should each put a hand on the altar and feed our quintessence into it so that…”

            “Whoa, whoa, wait, Princess,” Keith said. “We’re not Altean. We can’t do that.”

            “I’m just telling you what the scroll says.”

            “Well, the scroll seems to think we’re Altean,” Lance protested. “Tell it it’s wrong!”

            “I don’t think it works that way,” she said apologetically.

            Pidge shook her head. “It _knows_ we’re not Altean. The temple showed us Earth constellations when we were here before. And all living things have quintessence; Alteans are just better suited to transferring theirs, I think. So, there must be a way for us to be able to contribute our quintessence, which I assume is meant to power the… transformation?” Allura nodded. “We’ll figure it out. Maybe it’s kind of like bonding with our lions. We somehow contributed our quintessence to them, after all.”

            Apparently that was good enough for Keith. “Okay, so we put our hands on the altar. Then what?”

            Allura frowned over the scroll as she read. “Four of us need to put our hands on the altar, one pair of hands at each corner, and focus our quintessence into the energy necessary for forging. The smith – or smiths in this case,” she gestured to Coran and Hunk, “will put their hands directly on the luxidium. Oh, no, wait: one smith at a time. Those of us powering the ritual will need to stay still and focused.”

            “Oh man,” Lance whined, “so we’re gonna have to just stand still and stay quiet until they’re done?” Keith patted him on the arm consolingly.

            “Yes,” Allura told him sternly. “We’ll have Coran go first; cleansing Shiro’s blood is more important than a fancy prosthetic, I’m afraid.”

            “Yeah, I get it,” Hunk said. “Besides, those are the small bits.”

            “The smiths will, each in turn, have to focus their own quintessence and their minds and hearts on the form or forms they are requiring from the luxidium. The scroll says you should be able to ‘see’ what you need within the metal. Other than that,” and she laid the scroll out for them instead of answering in words. There was an illustration of how they were expected to stand: both hands lightly touching each corner, the smith in the center with the luxidium, all of them with their heads bowed and eyes closed.

            “If my eyes are closed, how will I know…?” Hunk began.

            “You’ve got to feel it as much as see it,” Allura told him. “Like with your lions.”

            Hunk fidgeted. “I sucked at the nose dive drill,” he reminded them all.

            “That was back when we first began,” Pidge said. “You and Goldie are a lot stronger now.” She patted his arm. “You’ve got this, Hunk. I know you do.”

            He smiled at her. “Yeah, okay.” He looked to Allura. “Um, is there something I should be doing while Coran is, er, smithing?”

            She tilted her head – _oh man, Shiro’s going to hate that he missed that_ – and picked up the scroll again to look it up. “It doesn’t say, but perhaps you should spend your time preparing. Visualize the arm in detail and how it works. You need more than plating, after all.” She rolled the scroll up and set it aside.

            “Yeah, totally.” He exhaled. “Okay, so I’ll just… prep. Right.”

            “Let’s get in position.” The princess moved towards the nearest corner of the altar.

            “How long is this gonna take?” Lance asked. “What if I need to go to the bathroom in the middle of it?”

            “I don’t think that’s going to happen,” Pidge replied.

            “I dunno, I drank a _lot_ of space juice before we came in here.”

            Pidge frowned at him as she took her place at one of the corners. “We were here for _three days_ before, and we didn’t need to eat, drink, sleep, _or_ go to the bathroom in that time.”

            “You still think that’s all science?” Keith asked her.

            “Just shut up and focus, Keith.”

            They settled in at their corners, bowed their heads, and closed their eyes. Allura’s hands glowed blue-white almost instantly. Hunk and Coran watched and waited. It was Keith’s hands that glowed next, and Hunk kind of expected the glow to be red, ‘cause, y’know, Red Lion and all that, but they were a sort of a mottled white-green-blue. The glow around Keith’s hands seemed to fluctuate more than the Princess’s, which was a single steady color. _Weird. Cool, but weird._

Lance’s hands were a green-blue, steady and strong, and when Pidge finally started glowing, her color was the same as Lance’s. _Super-weird. I’m used to us all being different colors._ Keith’s colors stabilized, but still flowed from blue-white to green-blue. It was almost rhythmic, like a pulse.

            Coran didn’t say anything about any of it; once all four pairs of hands glowed on the altar, straight lines shot out to meet in the center, like a giant X through the altar top. The luxidium was centered over the X and Coran put his hands on the metal to begin the smithing. Hunk focused on that rather than on the glowy hands of his friends.

            Coran’s hands glowed like Allura’s, but more blue than white. Still, they lit up right away. Hunk felt uneasy, watching everyone standing there, still and quiet. He felt like if he moved or made any noise, he’d break some sort of spell. _I guess that’s… kind of what we’re doing here. We’re working magic in order to get our super-tech to work right. And to help Shiro._

            A little piece of the luxidium seemed to melt off and form a small, thick ring that looked like it might fit over his thumb. _Okay, that’s probably the sensor._ Then another little rivulet formed on the other side and ran down to form a thick-wired grid. _And the filter_.

            He watched Coran’s hands stop glowing before Coran stepped away from the altar. He stumbled a little as he stepped backwards, and Hunk hurried to steady him. “Sorry,” Coran said quietly. “Got a little woozy there.”

            “You sure you’re okay?” he asked as the older man stood upright and straightened his clothes out.

            “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. Just not used to doing that.”

            “Think how I’m gonna handle it,” Hunk joked, but he was worried about that himself.

            Coran patted his shoulder. “You’ll do fine. Go on.”

            Hunk swallowed and stepped up to the altar. He eyed the luxidium for a moment, but then remembered that Lance wasn’t good at sitting still and, honestly, neither were Pidge or Keith when it came down to it, and Shiro still needed a new arm. _Okay, Hunk, you can do this._ He put his hands on the metal lump and closed his eyes.

            _Energy first._ _Now how do I…?_ He thought of Goldie, of how easy it had been to bond with her. He thought of Shay and the other Balmerans resting their hands against walls or floors and being connected to the Balmera and each other like that. He thought of all the times he’d seen Allura calm Shiro, or when he’d watched Coran interact with the crystal. He thought of his friends.

            He wasn’t really sure if any of that worked, but something in him… hummed, like a perfectly tuned engine. He turned his mental energies to the design of the arm. At first, he’d wanted to make it look entirely different than the Galra arm. He hadn’t wanted the visual reminder, and didn’t think anyone else – least of all Shiro – would want that, either. But an arm was an arm, and he knew a good design when he saw it. He’d focused mostly on changing the aesthetics: the same V imprint that was on their uniforms was repeated throughout: behind the knuckles, at the wrist, elbow, and stamped up near the top, almost like a tattoo. Mostly, the overall design was largely the same; no sense reinventing the wheel. _And at least it’s not all full of nasty Galra junk._

            He pictured the plates, the inner workings, everything he’d worked hard on either reverse-engineering from the existing arm or designing himself. He’d gotten some input from Pidge and Coran, and he’d seen some areas where he could tighten up things here and there, so he pictured those, too, to make sure the metal knew what it had to do.

            He could feel himself sweating. _Focus._ He had to focus on how everything was supposed to fit together, how it would function. He found himself getting lost in the design a little, thinking about things the luxidium couldn’t possibly do, like make fingers that could grip properly, all the cables and wires, every little bit of it. He pictured how it wouldn’t glow that evil nasty dark purple but maybe more like the bluish-white of Allura’s energy, and how he thought Shiro would like that. Hunk saw the arm in his mind the way he wanted to see it in reality – as part of his friend who was smiling, healthy, and back with them all again.

            He heard shouts and his first thought was _Oh no, what happened?! Is everyone alright?!_ But when he opened his eyes, he was on the ground and his friends were rushing towards him. “Hunk, buddy, you okay?!”

            Hunk squeezed his eyes shut for a long blink followed by two rapid-fire ones as he began to understand reality again. “Lance. Yeah. Yeah, I’m okay. Gonna have a bruise on my butt though.” He accepted Lance’s and Coran’s hands to help him back up, anxious to see if he’d done this “mental smithing” thing right. “Did it work?”

            There, on the altar, was the exact arm he’d imagined, exactly the way he’d imagined it. “No way,” he breathed, picking up the arm to inspect it. The fingertips were ridged and grooved – like real fingers! – even though they felt like metal. The joints all actuated superbly. He opened it up and found most of the internal workings were in there, aside from some cables and parts that really had to be made out of something more flexible. “Whoa. This is amazing.”

            “That _arm_ is amazing!” Pidge declared.

            “It looks really good,” Keith agreed.

            “Man, I’m actually kind of jealous,” Lance said.

            “We’re _not_ cutting your arm off just so you can have one,” Keith told him pre-emptively.

            “I didn’t say that.”

            “You were thinking it.”

            “So, now what?” Hunk asked brightly.

            “Well, I have to get these parts into the blood-cleanser,” Coran said, picking up his sensor and filter. “And we should probably all eat and rest up.”

            “Good idea,” Allura agreed.

            “Yeah, I’m all for the eating. I feel like I haven’t eaten in a week.” Hunk patted his stomach, which gurgled reproachfully at him.

            Everyone stopped and stared at the sound, and Hunk shifted uneasily. “What? It’s just a tummy gurgle.”

            “Yeah, but last time we were in here for three days,” Lance said. “And we weren’t even all that hungry when we came out. Who knows how long we’ve been in here this time? It might actually be a week!”

            “I’ll check the chronometers when we get back aboard the Castle,” Coran said. “But I doubt it’s been a week.”

            “This place plays tricks on you,” Lance insisted.

            “Whatever, let’s go eat!” Hunk declared. “I’m starved.”

 

**7 Sleep Cycles Ago**

A day and a half in that time-warping place. Hunk brought out bowls of triple-refined food goo, and they all tucked in like they _had_ been gone a week. Allura was reading over the temple scroll as she ate. And afterwards, everyone scattered: to sleep, to their watch shift, to whatever it was they wanted to do with their time. But Allura said something about moving on to “the next part” as she headed off-ship, carrying Shiro’s new arm (which Hunk had left at her request).

            “What do you mean ‘next part’?” Keith asked. “Isn’t that just ‘attaching it to his arm’? Or, y’know, what’s left of it.”

            Allura shook her head. “The Galra arm functioned as it did because of the energy in it. We need to infuse this one with energy as well, and _not_ energy that will try to override his own. And that’s what I’m going to do.”

            “I’ll go with you.”

            “Thank you, but it’s really not necessary. I don’t think the temple is going to throw any more traps at me. The scroll suggested this ritual, so I’m pretty sure the temple is expecting me again.”

            “Well, it’d better be expecting me, too, because I’m going with you.”

            She sighed. “Why.” It was more a demand than a question. “You said yourself that you believe in the Goddess of the Universe. Why don’t you trust Her temple to keep me safe?”

            “It isn’t about safety,” Keith admitted quietly. “I just… want to be there.”

            She tilted her head and softened her tone. “Really? Why?”

            “Partly because I feel like I’m not doing enough for him.” He didn’t clarify who he meant; he didn’t think he’d have to with Allura. “And partly because...”

            “Because?” she pushed gently.

            He wanted to drop it, tell her to go by herself after all. But he couldn’t do that. “…I feel like I have to be there. I don’t know.”

            Allura smiled a little. “You should’ve just said so, Keith.”

            He grumbled. He’d never liked it when people used the word ‘should’ around him. _I should do this, I should do that._ He could hear teachers, police officers, social workers, all telling him what he should and shouldn’t do. Shiro was the only one who could use that word and not instantly piss him off with it. He listened when Shiro said it. He didn’t always do what Shiro said, but he listened to him, at least.

            He shoved his hands in his pockets and waited for the princess to head out, then fell in behind her. _I guess I let the Goddess tell me what I ‘should’ do, too. I should search out in the desert. I should find the Blue Lion. I should go here at this time for an ‘arrival’. I should go back to this temple that tried to kill us all._

            What had started as “I’ve got nothing better to do,” back on Earth was now “Because She says so.” He knew that. He didn’t like it much, on principle, but the Goddess hadn’t led him astray yet. So far, so good. And it felt right to him, the same way fighting to free the universe from Zarkon felt right, the same way it felt right to listen to Shiro, and the same way it felt right to fall asleep next to Lance.

_And I want to see this next ritual. How is it different from sending your energy into it?_ ‘Cause she’d been doing that for a while now, after all. Maybe it hadn’t worked as well with all that Galra nastiness in there, but she’d done it. And it was basically what she’d done with the Balmera, right? So, what the heck, he asked her about the difference.

            “Well, I’m not entirely sure. The scroll tells me how to perform the rituals, not necessarily why they’re needed. It’s a lot like the Balmera ritual, but a crystal is something I can connect _with_ ; this is an entirely inanimate object. And the objective is not to interfere with Shiro’s energy, but rather to… complement it, I suppose? To enable him to connect with the arm better, I think, because there’s already a quintessence there. But this is all just my speculation.”

            They’d landed as close to the temple as they could, so it was a short walk. The temple no longer required them to take their helmets off (which was good, since neither he nor Allura were wearing their suits or helmets now anyway), but they still had to knock every time they entered. They always came into the same cathedral-esque room now, too. _At least the traps are gone._

            “Well, if it’s _your_ quintessence, I’m sure he’ll be able to connect to it just fine.”

            “And what does that mean?” she asked curiously as they walked towards the temple.

            Keith shot her a look. “You know exactly what I mean. Even if he didn’t have feelings for you, your energy literally takes his nightmares away.”

            “That’s not actually how it…”

            “And he _does_ care about you so, so much. He smiles like a complete dork whenever he talks about you.”

            “Does he?”

            “Yeah. A lot like how you’re smiling now.”

            She cleared her throat and he caught the blush spreading on her cheeks before she looked away. “Well, that- that’s good to know. Thank you.”

            “You make him happier than I’ve ever seen him. So, y’know, be careful with him. He’s more fragile than he looks.”

            She stopped in front of the temple doors and turned to face him. Her blush was mostly gone. “You’re being protective. It’s cute.”

            “It is not.” But he could feel his own face heat a little.

            “Shiro means a lot to you, too.” He nodded, and she smiled. “I promise I’ll be gentle.”

            “Thank you.”

            “Except when he doesn’t want me to be,” and then she turned to knock on the doors, and Keith was left with that innuendo and a mental image he hadn’t asked for or even wanted careening through his head. He squeezed his eyes shut as if he could force that picture out of his brain. He heard her chuckle to herself as the doors swung open and admitted them.

            “Princess,” he groaned, opening his eyes again.

            “Come on, you said you wanted to be here for this.”

            “I didn’t want to hear that.”

            “Hush, we’re in the temple of the Goddess. Now is not the time for such scandalous thoughts.”

            “You’re the one who…!”

            But she shushed him as they walked in, the sconces bursting into flame to help light the way for them. It was late afternoon, and daylight was fading, so the torches burned all the brighter to offset the oncoming darkness.

            Allura walked up to the altar, which had apparently changed _again_ : now it was taller, not as wide, made of highly-polished wood, with gilt-inlaid lion carvings and no words (at least, nothing that looked like it might be words). Allura didn’t seem surprised by this; she laid the arm atop it. Keith couldn’t help noticing that it was the perfect height for her.

            “I can’t guarantee this will be anything interesting to watch,” she warned him.

            “That’s okay.” He stepped away from the altar to look around; this ritual wasn’t something he needed to be a part of, and it felt like he was intruding on it, somehow. _Something about Allura sharing her energy with something intended for Shiro just feels like it should be private._

            Nothing else seemed to have changed. He walked up to a fountain and ran his hand idly through the cool water. He smiled at the feeling of the water slipping through his fingers. He wasn’t quite sure why, but he liked it. _Must be thirsty._ He pulled up a palmful of water and drank.

            Looking up from the fountain, he saw a door that he was almost sure hadn’t been there before. He glanced back at the princess, but she was doing her ritual thing: hands on the luxidium arm, head bowed, eyes closed. So, he jogged over to the door to check it out.

            It opened easily ( _oh good, I didn’t have to knock_ ), and inside it was… a bedroom? A dormitory, more like; there were two beds, each big enough for a single person. Each bed had a nightstand with a candlestick, both fitted with new, unburnt candles. There was a cheery fire crackling behind an ornate hearth gate. It was spartan, but cozy. _Monks’ quarters, maybe?_ But there were no monks, no nuns, no priests or priestesses, no worshippers, even. Near as they could tell, there was no one else on the planet.

            _Two beds. Two of us._ He looked up at the ceiling. “Are You expecting us to _sleep_ here?!” he asked aloud. There was no answer, but he knew he was right. “At least You don’t expect us to share a bed.”

            And then something – someone? – prompted him to go back to the main hall. NOW. He bolted out of the room in time to see Allura waver at her spot at the altar. He ran up and managed to catch her as she fell over backwards. “Princess? You okay?”

            “Hm?” She blinked her eyes open and looked around woozily. “I’m sorry. What happened?”

            “You passed out.”

            “Oh. I…”

            “You’re pushing yourself,” he told her sternly. “What would Shiro say if he were here?”

            “He’s _not_ here, and he’s not my nanny any more than you or Coran are,” she informed him, but she was too drained to put much heat behind it. “But… maybe I should’ve waited before trying this.”

            “Yeah, maybe you should have. C’mon, you need to rest.” He tried to heft her up a bit more, getting an arm around her waist.

            “You’re not going to carry me back to the ship,” she said.

            “You’re right. First of all, I need you to walk at least a little. And second, there’s a bed right over here.”

            “A bed?”

            “The Goddess provides, I guess. C’mon.” He helped her walk to the little dormitory. By the time they got there, she was a little steadier; enough so that he trusted her to stay upright as he moved to pull the blanket down for her.

            “How did you know this was here?”

            “I found it. Guess She figured we’d need it. Lay down. Get some sleep.”

            “The ritual isn’t complete,” she told him with a yawn as she climbed into the bed.

            “Worry about it after you wake up.”

            “I will. Worry, you know.”

            “Yeah, I know. But you’ve used a lot of energy today.”

            “It’s more than one day,” she reminded him. “Almost two full days now.”

            “And you’ve been using a lot of your energy almost non-stop for all that time. Go to sleep.”

            She didn’t protest as he pulled the blanket up over her. _Nice timing_ , he told the Goddess. He eyed the other bed, but he wasn’t sleepy yet, so he wandered back out into the main hall, pulling the door most of the way shut behind him.

            The torches nearest the dormitory had dimmed, but the ones by the altar were still going strong. He headed up there, curious to see if there was any visible change in the arm, though he kind of doubted there would be.

            But he was wrong: parts of it glowed faintly, barely visible in the torchlight. They glowed that same blue-white that Altean… everything seemed to have.

            He reached a hand towards it, then hesitated. Maybe he shouldn’t touch it. This had nothing to do with him, and what good was touching going to do, anyway? What, prove it was still real? That wasn’t really in question, was it? Something in him insisted though. _Touch it._

            The metal was cool, but somehow there was an underlying warmth, faint and thready. Like someone’s actual arm, but they’d been outside on a cool day, and their skin was cold, but there was still the heat of a beating heart under there. _Okay, a little freaky to think about._ But he felt compelled to put his entire palm on the arm, to grasp it firmly. Then his other hand.

            He didn’t think about it. He bowed his head, closed his eyes, felt the energy in the arm, and just… added his own. It was easier now than it had been when he’d contributed to the forging. It still felt a little weird, though. It was like filling a bottle with water, but the water came from some well deep inside, one he didn’t even know he had. It was draining him, but he had to keep going.

_I’m not in much better shape than Allura._ He’d been up the same amount of time, expended the same amount of energy. And he wasn’t a “sacred Altean” with their impressive power reserves. But he could _feel_ how close the arm was to being “full” and, dammit, he wanted to help. And he could, apparently. He didn’t ask how or why, only “how much more?”

            There was a feeling, at last, of completion. He set the arm back down on the altar carefully, and backed away. He dropped to one knee – out of exhaustion, he thought – and bowed his head again. He stayed there until he felt like he should ( _there was That Word again_ ) rise, and wobbled to his feet. He needed sleep.

            He dragged himself back to the dormitory. He didn’t even turn the covers down, just fell face first onto the empty bed.

 

**6 Sleep Cycles Ago**

            “Hey? Helloooooo?” Lance expected his voice to echo loudly but there was hardly any reverb at all, despite the high ceilings and massive amounts of stone work. He pushed the little float-y cart into the temple ahead of him. The place hadn’t changed and it looked empty.

            Before he could even start to worry, something tugged for his attention, off to his left. He saw a door and pushed the cart over towards it, peeking his head in. Allura and Keith were passed out on separate beds; it looked like Keith had been literal about the “passing out” part. Lance exhaled relief and then went over to poke his unconscious boyfriend in the ribs.

            “Nnng.”

            “Wakey wakey. I brought breakfast.”

            “Don’ wan’ any go ‘way.”

            “Sorry, no can do. Get up.”

            Keith made the “nnng” sound again, but he blinked his eyes open. “Lance?”

            “Yeah. Who’d you think you were talking to?”

            “I dunno. I didn’t… did you say something about ‘breakfast’?”

            Lance grinned. “Capri Suns and food goo!” He went back to the cart, hovering there in the doorway, and slid the top open to reach in and pull out a water packet. “Catch!” He lobbed it at Keith’s head. It bounced off, ricocheted off the wall, and hit Allura in the side. “Oops.”

            “Nice one,” Keith said, pushing himself up with a groan.

            “Wha..?” Allura was blinking awake now, as well.

            “G’morning, Princess. Sorry about the rude awakening. It’s all Keith’s fault.”

            “Hey!” But Keith stopped protesting because Lance was handing him a packet this time, and he began to realize exactly how thirsty he was.

            “Is something wrong?” she asked sleepily.

            “No. Just bringing breakfast.”

            “Oh, okay.” Then she flopped back down, pulled the covers over her head, and apparently went back to sleep.

            Lance shrugged, but Keith stopped sipping from his packet to protest, “You let _her_ sleep, how come you won’t leave me alone?”

            “Because she’s the princess and you’re the boyfriend,” Lance informed him airily. “DUH.”

            Keith stared at him for a long moment before commenting, “I’m not sure that’d make sense to me even if I were awake.”

            “Probably not,” Lance agreed, bringing over a bowl of food goo and a spork. “You’re not used to me making sense.”

            “That’s true.”

            “Yet.”

            “I fear the day,” Keith said dryly. He set the packet aside to start wolfing down his food.

            “Yeesh, are you even tasting that?”

            “Don’ nee’ ta tas’e ih,” he said around a mouthful of goo.

            “And don’t talk with your mouth full.” He looked around the little room. “So, what were you two up to all night?”

            Keith swallowed his goo and reached for the packet. “If I can’t talk with my mouth full, I’d rather eat than talk.” He took a long drink.

            “Expend a lot of energy, did you?” Lance grinned at him.

            Keith sat the packet down. “I… can’t actually tell if you’re being serious or not. Are you…? You don’t think that Allura and I…?”

            Lance snorted. “No way. She’s too gone over Shiro, and why would you even look at someone else when you have me?”

            “Exactly.” And then Keith returned to scarfing down food, but Lance couldn’t help the heat wave that washed over him. _I meant it as a joke. This was all just supposed to be teasing, but… he just… and so **casually** … _Lance wanted to tackle-kiss him, but Keith clearly needed to eat, and Allura was _RIGHT THERE_ , unconscious or no. So, instead he fidgeted and wished he’d brought a packet down for himself, so he could sip it all nonchalant-like and pretend like his rival/boyfriend hadn’t just agreed that Lance was all he’d want as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

            “So, seriously though, you two were gone the whole night.”

            “What, just the one this time?”

            Lance laughed. “Yeah, we’re a little surprised, too. Pidge was trying to convince me that maybe the temple was going in reverse and you guys’d actually be like a hundred years old or something.”

            “Allura’s already older than that,” he reminded him.

            “You Know What I Mean.”

            “Well, if I’m a hundred years old, I don’t feel like it.”

            “Good. I have plans when we get back to the Castle.” _You, me, and my room because it’s closest._ “But what _were_ you guys doing?”

            “It’s a ritual to …energize the arm, I guess? Something like that. Consecrate, maybe? I dunno. Some combination of the two.”

            “‘Consecrate’? Shiro’s getting some sort of holy relic as an arm? I’m getting even more jealous now.”

            “No, not a relic, and not ‘holy’, exactly, just… I don’t know how to explain it. Allura tried to fill it with her own energy, but she passed out. I finished the job, and I had to leave it on the altar as some sort of temporary offering or something? I don’t know, it wasn’t really explained. I did what I felt I had to, then I fell asleep.”

            “But you’re feeling okay now, right?”

            “Yeah. Still kinda tired, but okay.”

            Lance nodded. “Good, good.” Then something occurred to him. “Wait, _you_ filled the arm? With _your_ energy?” Keith shrugged and gave a nod, mouth full of food. “I didn’t know you could do that.”

            “Ah…” He swallowed his food. “I guess I didn’t either? I just did it.”

            “Huh. Well, finish up.”

            “Why? We needed for something?” But he shoveled another heaping sporkful into his mouth.

            Lance shrugged. “Coran’s got the blood-cleanser assembled and ready to go. We thought you two’d want to be there.”

            Keith nodded, mouth too full to even attempt talking, and Lance smiled. “What was that?” Allura mumbled, poking her head back out from under the covers.

            “Shiro’s going to have his first round of blood cleansing. Or quintessence cleansing, really.”

            “Hm? Oh!” She finally sat up. “We have to be there!”

            “Cool your jets, Princess. They’re still setting it up. I was dispatched with breakfast.” He nodded at the water packet still lying on her bed. “And to make sure you were both okay.”

            “Oh, thank you.” She stretched and picked up the packet as Lance turned to get her a bowl of delicious space goo.

            “No problemo, Your Highness.”

            “Oh! The arm!” She threw the covers off.

            Keith broke in before she could get up. “It’s done. Don’t worry about it.”

            “What do you mean ‘it’s done’? I didn’t get a chance to complete the ritual!”

            “I did. I finished it.”

            Allura stared at Keith long and hard, completely ignoring the bowl Lance was trying to get her to accept. Keith shrugged, and Lance prodded her arm with the spork. She looked down at it, back over at Keith, and then accepted the bowl and spork with a murmured, “Thanks,” and began eating.

            “Where is the arm, anyway?” Lance asked.

            “Should still be on the altar,” Keith told him.

            “I’ll get it. You two did enough already.”

            Allura swallowed her bite of goo. “We’ll be ready to go when you get back.”

            Lance nodded and jogged out to go collect the arm but he stopped almost immediately.

            He wasn’t sure how he hadn’t seen it before: a single shaft of light was shining down on the arm. He might’ve chalked it up to a coincidence if it weren’t an overcast morning and if the light wasn’t shining through the stained-glass window – specifically through the black (well, purplish) V near the top.  “Whoa.”

            He ran up to the altar, wondering if it were sacrilege to remove the arm at this point. But then the moment passed and the light faded away. Lance hesitated a moment more, then remembered that they were waiting for all of them back on the Castle, and took the arm. “Thanks for everything,” he said to the open air. He wasn’t sure he believed in this Goddess of the Universe stuff, but hey, better safe than sorry.

 

 

            The worst part was the tube snaking up into the remains of Shiro’s right arm. It was unnatural and ghastly to Allura, and it made him look like part of some sort of science experiment. _I guess he is, though._ She tried to remember that they were _helping_ Shiro, not trying to turn him into a weapon like the druids had done. She tried to remember that this would bring him back to her, to all of them.

            Coran’s cleanser hovered next to the pod, and she tried to ignore it as the clear tank on it began circulating Shiro’s blood. Coran was watching the readouts closely.

            “How long until we know if it works?” Keith asked.

            “Well, it’s got to do a full cycle.”

            “And how long will _that_ take?” Lance pursued.

            Coran turned to face them and murmured to himself as he counted on his fingers, “A few hours, minimum.” There was a chorus of groans.

            “You don’t have to stay,” Allura told the paladins. “One of us will let you know immediately if there’s any change in his condition.”

            “And about the success or failure of the machine, right?” Pidge put in.

            “Yes, also that,” she assured her.

            That appeared to have satisfied them, because they all headed out again. Allura watched Lance grab hold of Keith’s hand and practically tug him out the door, and she smiled softly and tried to swallow her envy down. _Look at them, happy and safe together. I wish I could have that again._

            “You don’t have to stay either,” Coran offered.

            “No, it’s okay. I want to, for at least a little longer. If you don’t mind, that is?”

            He shook his head. “No, I don’t mind.” He glanced at Shiro before returning to his machine. “I wouldn’t take you from the man you love.”

            “Love?” she repeated suddenly. “I wouldn’t say…”

            “No, you wouldn’t,” Coran agreed. “But it’s still true.” He tapped on one of the screens, increasing a level slightly.

            “I don’t know about that. I care for him, very much, but ‘love’ might be overstating it.”

            “I could be wrong,” Coran hedged at her displeasure.

            “Coran. Stop being my advisor for a little bit?”

            He exhaled and turned to smile at her. “Don’t think of love as the end of a story, Allura, as the ‘happily ever after.’ It’s the beginning. And sometimes it doesn’t last and sometimes it goes on for the rest of your life, and it can be anything and anywhere in between. I don’t know if what you and Shiro have is going to be one of those storybook romances, but an old man like me knows love when he sees it. Whatever’s in the future will reveal itself in time. But right now? You love him.”

            She thought about that. “I ordered his arm cut off.”

            “You had to do that. And you were right to do it.”

            “He woke up.”

            “You put him out again.”

            “I wish I hadn’t. No, I wish I hadn’t had to.” She walked up to his pod and looked at him, silent and still. “I didn’t like it. Any of it.”

            “Of course not. No one did. He’s a good man, a good leader. No one wanted to hurt him. And if he’d been in his right mind, he wouldn’t have wanted to hurt anyone else, either. But he wasn’t. He had to be stopped. I’m sure he’d thank you for that if he could.”

            She nodded. “Do you think Father would have approved?”

            Coran made a noncommittal noise and turned back to the blood cleanser. “I couldn’t speak for King Alfor.”

            “But you knew him. What do you think he’d have said?”

            “I also know that his approval – or lack thereof – wouldn’t stop you.”

            “Coran.” She was getting annoyed.

            He relented. “He’d… have some concerns, but he’d likely have them no matter who you brought to meet him. He would be evaluating any potential spouse of yours as a future co-ruler of Altea, after all. I think he’d worry about you being so taken with a…”

            “An alien?”

            “…a warrior,” he finished. “Your father wanted peace for you and all Alteans. He wouldn’t have wanted you to be fighting, to need a soldier at your side.”

            “Yes, well, times have changed,” she said tightly. “Because of Zarkon.”

            “He wouldn’t want you to get so caught up in vengeance that…”

            “This isn’t about vengeance! This is about justice! It’s about freeing the universe from Zarkon’s rule!”

            “I know that. I just want to make sure that it _stays_ that way. That you don’t lose sight of the goal.”

            She huffed. “We’re getting off topic.”

            He cleared his throat. “I think King Alfor would have liked Shiro. That’s not the same thing as approving of him for long-term matrimonial prospects.”

            “I’m not talking about ‘long-term matrimonial prospects’,” Allura retorted, folding her arms. “I’m not even thinking about those right now.” Coran gave her a Look. “Mostly,” she admitted, and he nodded. She cocked her head. “Do _you_ approve?”

            Coran laughed. “Oh, _there’s_ a moot question! Do **I** approve?” He laughed harder.

            “Well, I asked. And, as you pointed out, I’ll do as I like anyway. I’m just curious.”

            Coran settled down, with only the occasional chuckle. “He’s good for you, and he cares very much for you. This whole ‘random attacking’ thing aside, I trust him to protect and look after you.” She snorted. _“Protect and look after me,” indeed. Coranny the Nanny, now and forever._ “So, yes, I do approve, for what little that’s worth.”

            “Thank you, Coran.”

            He dipped his head by way of a bow and returned to looking over the machine and its readings. “This is going well so far. Time will tell, of course, as with all things.”

            She nodded. “Perhaps I will go find something else to do.” She headed towards the door. “You will let me know _the moment_ anything happens.” It wasn’t a question.

            “You’ll be the first, Princess.”

            “Thank you.” She hesitated, remembering something. “Coran? I’ve been remiss in not saying this sooner, but I am sorry. About… your family.”

            He paused and turned back from the machine to look at her sadly. “Thank you, Princess.”

            “I forget sometimes that I’m not the only one who has sacrificed.”

            He shook his head a little. “I knew what it meant when I made this choice.”

            “You didn’t know it’d be ten thousand years.”

            “No,” he agreed. “But I knew that… that I wouldn’t be seeing them again in any case.”

            She cocked her head and then her eyes widened as it hit her. “Oh. Oh, Coran, I’m so…”

            “It’s fine. Well, it’s not, but it’s the past. Our loved ones would want us to be happy in the present.” He turned back to the cleansing machine.

            She glanced from Coran to Shiro and back again, then nodded. “Yes, of course. Are you, though? Happy?”

            “Be happier if I could get these levels just right; they’re always just a smidge off…” he grumbled, still adjusting the machine.

            She decided she’d done enough damage for one day, and let him be.

 

**4 Sleep Cycles Ago**

 

            It turned out that one cycle did, in fact, take hours (the old finger counting was right on the money that time!) and the cleansing machine’s readouts said that it had helped, but not enough. More cycles were needed to completely cleanse him of the Galra taint. They decided to let Shiro’s body rest and recharge between each cycle, but the cryo-replenisher’s readouts started getting less confused.

            Three cycles seemed to do the trick, or at least to convince the sensor that there was nothing more to be cleansed. Pidge was normally happy to take “so small as to not be detected” levels in something, but all this “magic” stuff made her uneasy.

            Keith suggested they hook up Shiro’s arm, and Allura seconded the idea: the new arm, fully finished and outfitted with a glove to help further improve grip (and keep the cold metal hand from chilling those it touched) was pulsing with Altean (or, at least, non-Galra) energy now, contributed by two of the people who meant the most to Shiro. If there was any Galra energy left in there, hopefully the Altean energy would keep it in check if not cleanse it outright.

            Of course, attaching the prosthetic meant getting Shiro out of stasis. Trust the Alteans to have a method for it though. “There’s a way to keep him in stasis for a short period of time, even out of the pod,” Coran told them. “I wouldn’t have trusted it before this, what with the pod’s difficulties in reading Shiro’s state of being, but now? Should work just fine.”

            “How long will the stasis last once he’s out?” Pidge asked.

            “Few minutes,” Coran said. “We’ll get him out and immediately administer the anesthetic. He shouldn’t even wake up during the transition.”

            “Isn’t that kind of dangerous?” Lance worried.

            “Well, yes,” Coran admitted. “But the Castle has excellent surgery systems. They’ll monitor his life signs throughout the procedure, including the transition from pod-induced stasis to anesthetized. It should be fine.”

            Pidge looked at Keith and Allura. _Everyone_ looked at Keith and Allura. They looked at each other and both shrugged. “He’d say take the risk, I think,” Keith said.

            “I think so, too,” Allura agreed. “We’ll do it. I’ll get him out of the pod and put him on the operating table. Hunk, I hate to ask you to be in here for the operation, but it’s your engineering marvel we’re attaching to him.”

            “I wouldn’t say ‘marvel’,” he protested, but Pidge nudged him for his blushing.

            “It is though.” She looked over to Allura. “I’d volunteer to be here for it, but I can’t do anything but run diagnostics, which is really more of an after-the-fact thing.”

            Allura nodded. “We’ll call you in as soon as the operation’s done.”

            “I’ll keep Keith distracted,” Lance volunteered.

            “I don’t need to be distracted because I’ll be in here,” Keith insisted.

            “No, you won’t,” Lance told him. “Back me up on this: the more people in here, the greater chance Shiro gets some sort of infection, right?”

            “Well, yes, but the pod would…” Allura stepped on Coran’s foot, and he winced. “I mean, yes. That’s true.”

            “There’s no reason I can’t be in here for this!” Keith was adamant, but Lance was already working on hauling Keith out of the infirmary.

            Coran sighed and said, “I guess we’re doing this now then?” and began activating the operating table and the surgeon bots.

            “Pidge, stand outside and make sure Keith doesn’t get back in here,” Allura ordered her. “I’m going to get the scroll; I’ll be right back.”

            “The scroll? From the temple?” Pidge asked incredulously. “Why?”

            “There’s a rite in there for this sort of thing.”

            She groaned. “Please don’t tell me we have to take Shiro to that crazy time-warping temple.”

            “No, fortunately not. But I saw it last night, and…”

            “What is it? ‘A Ritual For the Bonding Of Metal To Flesh’ or something?”

            “Close. It’s specifically for…”

            “I don’t care,” Pidge said. “It’s unnecessary and stupid. Rites and rituals and prayers for everything.”

            “They’ve worked so far,” Hunk pointed out.

            “Worked brilliantly!” Coran put in.

            “Look, I get that we needed a special way to forge the luxidium, but was the rest of this really necessary? Was it necessary to pray to dig up the luxidium when a scanner could have found it? Was it necessary to do a ‘ritual’ to infuse the arm with energy when you’ve infused Shiro with energy over and over again?”

            “Maybe the scanner wouldn’t have found it,” Hunk replied. “I mean, scanners don’t show this entire _planet_ if it doesn’t want to be seen. Maybe the luxidium would’ve been the same way.”

            “And we wouldn’t have known _to_ scan for it without the Goddess’s help,” Allura added.

            “Okay, but the ‘infusion ritual’ or whatever that scroll called it?” Pidge pressed. “This is a medical procedure. This is all science. There’s no need to make things all ‘magical’ for this, is there?”

            Allura sucked in a breath and narrowed her eyes, and Pidge readied herself for whatever it was the princess was about to throw at her. But then the air went out of Allura all at once. “Maybe not,” she agreed quietly, “but it makes me feel like I’m helping. Like I’m doing some good for him. And it might be helpful on its own; it should help his body not reject the arm. So I’m going to do it.”

            Pidge frowned. “I… guess I can understand that,” she allowed. She didn’t understand why it had to be “magic” this and “prayer” that, but wanting to do anything you could when it looked like you couldn’t do anything? She understood _that_ just fine. “I’ll be outside, in case Keith gets loose.”

            Allura nodded and left, hurrying to get her scroll as Coran finished transforming the infirmary into a surgery suite. “Hey, Pidge,” Hunk said, catching up with her before she could get to the doors, “this stuff really bothers you, doesn’t it?”

            “I just don’t like relying on something so… amorphous. I want things I can see and touch and hear. I want science and logic and math. Numbers. Nothing weird or crazy.”

            “Yeah, I get it. You like things that make sense. I do, too. Insert tab A into slot B so that you can get something which does X. I get that. But, y’know, our lives kind of _are_ weird and crazy now.”

            “All the more reason I’d kind of like something to just be normal,” she grumped.

            “’Normal’ like ‘futuristic alien cat-bots that are actually from ten thousand years ago and need to form mystical bonds with their pilots so that they can then, in turn, form a giant man-bot to save the universe with’?” he pointed out.

            “Hn. Good point.”

            “And, y’know, friendship isn’t tangible, but that’s what’s keeping us all going, right? That’s what makes us a team and helps us form Voltron and defend the universe. ‘Cause we rely on each other. We’re like a family, and that feeling isn’t science. Well, maybe it is, with like brain-chemicals and whatnot, but you get what I mean?”

            She smiled a little. “Yeah. Thanks, Hunk.”

            He patted her shoulder. “Any time. Better get out there; Lance is pretty distracting when he wants to be, but you know how stubborn Keith is.”

            She snorted. “Yeah, you wanna bet on which force is stronger: Lance’s distraction techniques or Keith’s stubbornness?”

            Hunk grinned widely. “2 days of cleaning duty says Lance keeps Keith in his room with no trouble.”

            “You’re on.”

 

**A Few Hours Ago**

            “And after that, we put you back in the pod,” Allura finished, “so your body could heal from the stress of the operation. I shut off the stasis, and the pod woke you up, and… here you are.”

            Shiro looked around at all of them, at the mice sleeping in his now-empty food bowl, and smiled gratefully. “Thank you all so, so much for everything you did. I’m sorry that it was necessary.”

            “You don’t have to be,” she told him gently, resting a hand on his left arm. “We know it wasn’t you.”

            He looked at her and she smiled a little, so happy to see his face with his eyes _open_ for a change. “If you were in my place, wouldn’t you apologize?”

            “Probably,” she acknowledged. “And wouldn’t you tell me the same thing I just told you?”

            “Probably,” he repeated. He looked to Keith. “I am so, so sorry, buddy. For attacking you, for making you need to take my arm off.”

            “Don’t worry about it.”

            “Pidge, I would never hurt you.”

            “I’m just sorry I had to tase you for so long,” she replied. “I’m glad I didn’t do any permanent damage.”

            “Lance, Hunk, I must’ve scared you both so badly.”

            “For different reasons, yeah,” Hunk admitted. “But it’s okay, Shiro. We know you didn’t mean it.”

            “Yeah, we’re still cool,” Lance told him.

            He looked back to her, and she leaned forward and pressed a lingering kiss to his forehead. “I forgive you,” she said softly. “And I know you would never hurt me or any of us.”

            He sighed, and she sat up again. “Heck of a month. I’m really proud of all of you. You pulled together and got the job done. Thank you.” He looked down at his new right arm, gleaming white, and then smiled up at all of them. “This is wonderful. It’s amazing. I don’t even have words. It’s still a little strange, but I’m glad to be rid of that Galra arm, even if it was useful.”

            “Oh, this one will be, too!” Hunk piped up. “It should have all the same functionality as your old arm, except for the whole ‘accessing Galra tech’ thing.”

            “And I took care of that end,” Pidge put in. “Still getting it uploaded to the suits, but we should all have a nice easy way to sneak into Galra computers now.”

            He shook his head. “You guys are absolutely the best team in the universe.” And then he stood and darted over to gather the paladins up in a big hug. Allura laughed a little, seeing them all so happy. He held a hand (his right) out to her, and she smiled and took it, joining in the group hug. Hunk pulled Coran in, and they were all hugging and smiling and laughing.

            She’d always miss her family, her planet, her civilization. But she had these wonderful friends now. She wasn’t alone. She wouldn’t have to be alone ever again, so long as she had them all. She hugged them back with all her heart.

**Now**

           

            Shiro turned from the star map when he heard the door open, expecting Coran. “Oh.” He smiled. “Hello.”

            “What are you doing here?” Allura asked. “Where is Coran? He’s supposed to be on watch now, isn’t he?”

            “I asked for some time alone, so Coran went on break. He said he’d monitor my location and come back when I left the bridge.”

            “Are you okay?” She walked up to stand on his right.

            “Yeah. Just thinking.”

            “You know you can always confide in me if you need to,” she reminded him.

            He gave her a sidelong smile. “Fair enough.” He looked over the star map as he stood in the center of the bridge. So many stars, so many worlds. So much life out there in the dark, and so much death. He looked at Allura again, briefly, then addressed the universe surrounding them.

            “What I’m thinking is… that everything I’ve loved my whole life is so dangerous. I thought I was prepared for that, but I wasn’t. There are dangers out here that I could never have imagined; threats that, if you’d told me about them back on Earth, I’d’ve sworn you were crazy. But they’re out here, and they’re real.

            “And even with that – with all the pain and all the blood and all the tragedy I wasn’t ready for – I love it still. I just want to learn everything I can, want to know all about it, want to see it all with my own eyes, reach out and touch it,” and he stretched his right hand towards the star map, “with my own hands.

            “It’s all so beautiful. So _awe_ some. Sometimes, when I try to take it all in, I have trouble breathing. That I’m here and this is all happening… sometimes it feels like a dream. One of the good ones. Usually,” he admitted, dropping his hand back to his side.

            “You love it out here that much?”

            “Yeah,” he said softly, before turning to her to find her smiling at him. He smiled back. “Yeah, I do.” He threaded his left hand into her hair, just behind her ear, and kissed her, savoring the softness of her lips and enjoying her arms looping around his waist. He pulled her in close to him, close enough to feel her heartbeat.

            And when he pulled away, she whispered huskily, “I’m glad,” and pulled him back in for an encore.

            When he had use of his lips again, he smiled at her, and she mirrored it back at him. She dropped her arms from his waist, but only so she could take his right hand and give it a squeeze. He squeezed back gently, and she tugged him towards the door, sending the star map away with a wave of her hand.


End file.
